Western Farm Subsidies and New Powerful Hurricanes
Allow African Farms To Create A Bread Basket and weaken Hurricanes
By Isiah Scott
Sahara Desert fertilizes storms
The Sahara Desert historically fertilizes the Amazon; this process has been going for thousands of years. The nutrient rich dust travels from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean both in the air and water to the Americas. But something is happening; there is a dieback of the forest in the Amazon.
The Sahara desert is expanding in a southern direction creating million of hectares of new farming wastelands. The very fragile balance of dry lands and wetlands in the Sahara is shifting toward a new wide spread dust bowel. The collapse of Sudanese belt farming is adding billion of tons of dust to the atmosphere and the hurricane corridor over the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas.
Massive locust invasions are under way in the Sudan belt from West Africa and migrating to East African across Central Africa now infesting the country of Chad. This pan-Sudan invasion has infested and destroyed millions of hectares of farmland cross Africa. This invasion of locusts backed after years of oil led civil conflicts had exacerbated the impact of drought spurring a food crisis and a Mid-Atlantic dust storm.
Collapse of Sudanese farming
The UN report warmed in the spring of 2005 that mass hunger and famine is bearing down on millions of people in Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso and southern Sudan. The very fragile health and farming infrastructure in Chad is collapsing. The famine is now spreading into southern Sudan along the path of the US World Bank ordered death march. These crises are linking together to form a Pan African-Sudanese belt human nightmare. The famine is also creating massive amount of dust from the Sahara spreading south deeper into the Sudan green belt.
The Saharan dust is also blowing across the Atlantic Ocean and into Gulf of Mexico.
This Saharan dust also has formed a group of new deadly thermal hotspots alone the historical hurricane development path across the Atlantic Ocean that Northern American hurricanes take to the American homeland.
These thermal hotspots add massive energy via heat to the tropical depressions that reform into hurricanes like Katrina.
Atlantic Ocean hot spots move into Gulf
It appears the these Saharan hot spots are also interfacing with the Mississippi River plume both in the Gulf and the Western Atlantic Ocean near the eastern United States over the Gulf Stream. This Atlantic dust is critical to wind intensity, some suggest that this dust layer is mixing with sea spray feed the development of storms in the layer between the ocean and the air and makes it possible for extremely high winds to form.
These African hotspots have moved in the Gulf of Mexico and have interfaced with other chemically created hotspots alone the Northern Mississippi River. The African hotspots are also interacting with the chemical toxic Mississippi River plume flowing into the Gulf creating addition thermal islands to feed storm crossing the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Billion tons of Sahara dust contributes to the intensity of North American hurricanes. In the case of power of hurricane Katrina, the transfer of Mid-Atlantic dust hotspot clearly contributed to its force. There are deepening interdependency Atlantic Ocean dust storms, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico and storm recharging in the Gulf itself.
Given this new type and power of hurricanes and their growing threats to many eastern and southern American cities, the Financial Times and the US speaker of the House of Representative have gone public with suggestions that the city of New Orleans not be rebuilt. With no international funding to address the collapse of African farming, the billion of tons of dust coming to North American will not only continue, but also increase.
According to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, more than 100 of every thousand Ghanaian children die before their fifth birthday. This is at least 10 times the rate of the rich countries. These deaths are preventable, but the health budget is only one quarter of what is needed to tackle the crisis. The Ghanaian austerity budget supervised by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank constitute a death warrant that results from Ghana’s poverty and the lack of sufficient donor aid.
Cameroon and Chad, the potential breadbasket of Central Africa, helplessly watch as their oil and foreign multinational oil companies pipe gas they need to develop their agriculture export trade out of their countries below market prices. Some of the foreign multinationals oil companies are leading recipients of farm subsidies.
Unknowing taxpayers from North America, Japan and Western Europe paid 600 billion dollars a year or 8,000 dollars per family via farm subsidies and military defense to ensure the death warrants are served on the world’s starving people.
Under pressure from a 600 billion dollar federal debit and then Secretary of State C. Powell, reportedly forced President George Bush has pledged in 2002 a strong reduction in US subsidies, but only on the condition that Japan and Europe Union do the same. Bush lacked the political will to stand up to the multinationals killing Africa’s agriculture trade. So the African starvation and ethic cleaning has gone on for two more years and the subsidies remain in place.
US Corporate Welfare, African starvation
The Bush pledge should have been the basis for a new Africa policy initiative, but died when the Bush administration signed into law the $171 billion-farm subsidies bill in 2002, that shattered all records of corporate welfare. The Bush African trade pledge was naked political deception and misinformation. The US subsidies triggered a new round of subsidy increases and deepened levels of wide world starvation. The Western media all but blacked out the linkage between the Bush subsidy policy and deepening collapse of African agriculture export trade. African share of world exports declined from an already low 4 percent in 1980 to 1 percent in 2003. The 1 percent has been maintained by the increase in the world price of oil and masked the actual degree of non-energy collapse of African agricultural trade.
The European Union and Japan and even Mexico followed suit by increasing their subsidies programs or what BusinessWeek calls ‘armor plating’ farm economies. Bush lacked the political will to defend his own plan to reduce subsidies, against the Chinese containment faction in his administration.
Chinese containment policy, African starvation
The economic aspects of Powell’s new African initiative became an early victim of the new Chinese containment policy. US farm subsidies, Chinese oil imports and the Space arms race became critical economic weapons in a Cold War strategy to try and bankrupt Chinese military expansion. China has become a net importer of food. The US containment strategy is forcing China to make cash payments for imported food and oil. China is paying almost 90 billion dollar a year for oil. Reports of food shortages are reported across China. US multinationals are emerging as a major exporter of strategic foods to China, i.e. by maintaining artificially low foods prices worldwide; the US is retarding Chinese agriculture development. China is importing 7 billion dollars of food and grains from US multinationals.
The myth of Gleneagles G8 African aid initiative
The 25 billion dollars the Gleneagles G8 current spend on development assistance for extreme poverty is less than 5 percent of the money that ensure that genocide and ethic cleaning takes place. The G8 African aid increase does not even offset the recent armor plating subsidies increases by the US, EU and Japan. The proposed new funding level of 50 billion dollar a year in official aid for Africa translates into around 75 to 100 dollars per African. The United States five-year commitment is less than one day of Pentagon spending, and two cents of every 1,000 of US national income. Canada and Japan while agreeing to given 0.7 of their GND to aid extreme poverty have refused to commit to a timetable. More importantly, none of the G8 countries will publicly debate mush less commit to any timetable to phase out farm subsidies.
100 million Africans at risk of extreme poverty
Mr. Blair and other British officials continue to struggle with the Group of Eight (G8) countries to commit to an extra 50 billion dollars in political face saving aid to Africa by 2010. After all the recent Africa aid press and rallies, 10 billion dollar a year to save starving Africans would seem to be a small amount money for the richest countries in the world to come up with for the food security crisis for 700 million poor Africans. Even with the international community watching, forcing the powerful farm subsidies lobby to give up even 10 billion dollar its corporate welfare is proving to be politically impossible. Reportedly the G8 new plan will only save 10 million of the 100 million African at risk of starvation. The major foods producing African states are pushing for Europe to open its markets to new African exports.
The source of the African food crisis is one of the oldest and most powerful white lobbies, the New York –London slave cabal. These super rich banking families and multinationals are fighting to maintain financial hegemony over African political economy even face massive worldwide political protest. The human nightmare that was the Belgium Congo is the concept ional model to understand the current African crisis.
Unlike their advanced western oil and manufacturing interests, there is no comparative economic advantage in most market agribusiness segments without major infrastructure investments. Without the farm subsidies, multinationals can complete in world agriculture trade. Since the establishment of new World slavery, these rich families have used taxpayer’s money to subsidize their agribusinesses. The Irish famine was to support food pries in British and forced ethic clearing of Ireland. Farm subsidies are naked political corporate welfare.
According to the Heritage Foundation Policy Research & Analysis--John D. Rockefeller reportedly received 2001- 2002, 134,556 dollars in farm subsidies. The four large corporate recipients were Westvaco, Chevron, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance and Caterpillar. Less than 10 percent of the recipients receive 73 percent of all farm subsidies.
African food exporters are fighting to create the infrastructure conditions to develop the African agriculture trade to drive its industrialization.
In order to open up world agriculture trade to African producers, farm subsides must be immediately reduced by 50 present or 200 billion dollar and phased out in three years. Such a reduction would allow major new social programming in the United States. Even General C. Powell understood, this political challenge was a serious task that President Bush was not up to. World opinion is not enough to reduce the farm subsidy handouts. The solution of the African food security question threatens the bases of the post WWII Western power structure.
The political reality is that the whole effort by the G8 to save Africa is little more than an international public relations ruse. To its credit, Germany is actively resisting being part of the British ruse on African starvation. According to the Financial Times, the US is punishing Germany, officially for its Iraq opposition. While Africa is not mentioned, German opposition to the British ruse is a factor.
African food security is not about more aid, but about real investment in modern food-production infrastructure and exports opportunities.
Two years ago, July 2003, the presidents of Mali and Burkina Faso publicly begged President Bush in an op-ed article in the New York Times to change US farm subsidy policy:
West African Presidents speak out
The West African President stated-- Cotton is our ticket into the market. Its production is crucial to economic development in West and Central Africa, as well as the livelihoods of millions of people there. Cotton accounts for up to 40 percent of export revenues and 10 percent of gross domestic product in our two countries.
According to the International Cotton Advisory Committee, cotton subsidies amount to about 5.8 billion dollar in the production year of 2001 to 2002, nearly equal the amount of cotton trade for this same period. Such subsidies lead to worldwide overproduction and distort cotton prices, depriving poor African countries of their only comparative advantage in international trade.
Not only is cotton crucial to our economies, it is the sole agricultural product for our countries to trade. Although African cotton is on the highest quality, our production costs are about 50 percent lower than in developed countries even though we rely on manual labor. In wealthier countries, by contrast, lower-quality cotton is produced on large mechanized farms, generating little employment and having a questionable impact on the environment. The cotton there (US) could be replaced by other high valuable crops.
In the period from 2001 to 2002, America’s 25,000 cotton farmers received more in subsidies—some 3 billion dollars more—than the entire economic output of Burkina Faso, where two million people depend on cotton. Further, United States subsidies are concentrated on just 10 percent of its cotton farmers. Thus, the payment to about 2,500 relatively well off farmers has the unintended but nevertheless real effect of impoverishing some 10 million rural poor people in West and Central Africa.
The G8 leadership refuses to force multinationals oil companies taking Africa’s oil and gas, to provide the necessary energy to African food producers for massive food production in Africa to feed it starving people and earn export income. Development of a modern agriculture exports economy would be a critical first down the road toward African industrialization. The energy to produce the food is being taken away by the multinational oil companies. Energy rich Cameroon is now a net importer of industrial energy. Only 5 percent of the population consumes electricity, less than 7 million Btu (vs. US value over 400 million Btu). Wood burning is the basis for the agriculture economy.
600 billion dollars of Farm subsidies
The G8, also refuses to drop the 600 billion dollars of farm subsidies given to domestic multinationals who keep world food prices artificially low in G8 final markets, there by blocking tens of billion of dollars of African food imports to G8 markets. Ten of billions of dollars of developing countries energy is forcibly soled to oil multinationals at below mark prices to pay foreign debt. This 600 billion-corporate welfare political give away program funds the largest genocide and ethic cleaning campaign in human history. African and Latin American are unknowingly supporting it every time they buy food at multinational chain food stores.
Genocide against Africa
The United Nation Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) committed the International community to halving world poverty by 2015, a decade from now. The UN warns that 3 million children will die in Central and Western Africa alone. Millions of other Africans will die from starvation related causes. With the current oil crisis and subsides structure, the UNMDG goal is likely to be achievable only through the death of half of the poor by starvation, disease and local conflicts. In the case of Africa this could mean the deaths of another 100 million people over the next ten years. This G8 de facto food policy is tantamount to genocide against Africa.
The Doha Development Agenda negotiations, sponsored by the World Trade Organization, to reduce subsidies has collapsed. Rich countries would rather give African leadership 50 billion (an increase of only 10 billion dollars) and keep the 600 billion dollar farms subside program, rather than address the real African food security issue. The oil issue is well known, but the billions of dollar Japanese, American and European food subsidy issue is not. Multinational food-processing firms, lobby billions of subsidies behind nationalism, and protectionism, while third world peoples starve to death. Most food producing developing countries are unable to get either the international funding, food-processing, picketing or industrial markets to develop their agriculture markets.
Control oil, control food production
A real commitment to ending African poverty is a real commitment to a robust food-processing energy grid. Any thing short of an improved power grid will not work. Lack of oil to produce food in developing countries and subsidized agro-food multinationals in the industrial countries ensure the death of millions of Africans. Multinational energy companies are moving to take control of Africa’s energy grids to control food production. The reliable supply of energy is one of many important requirements for significant growth in Africa’s agricultural productivity. For farmers in most African countries, access to fuels or electricity for farm operations or crop processing is limited and very costly. If access can be improved, and energy needs for agriculture anticipated and met, then a potential roadblock to agricultural growth can be avoided.
Rapid growth in agricultural production could then stimulate rural and overall economic development. The objective of food security could come closer to reality, and exports of agriculturally based products could improve the regional trade balance. Simply put, the provision of energy for agriculture is essential to Africa’s long-term well-being. With oil now at 60 dollars per barrel and most African countries using oil exports to pay foreign debt, the rich countries beyond the reach of African farmers and food processing firms are keeping its use for food production. The direct consequence of energy triage is growing starvation, many cases, in African countries with massive amounts of oil and gas.
Elimination the multinational farm welfare program
Mali is unique among African countries for its significant nomadic and pastoral populations and for its extensive use of animal traction. In contrast, the potential “bread basket of the Central Africa” the Cameroon once rich in oil and gas, lies within the rich humid belt of Central Africa, with large potentially arable area, increasing cultivated requires modern agriculture infrastructure, ports, energy grids and careful tropical forest management. Cameroon and its river cities are ideally positioned for nuclear-powered value added food processing and manufacturing.
The Sudan is the potential “bread basket of the Middle East”
--with only 10 percent of its potentially arable land under cultivation and the greatest extent of irrigation in the region. This agricultural potential can be developed by an international political solution to the civil war and development of agriculture infrastructure and elimination to the multinationals in fighting over oil.
The key is not aid, but industrial infrastructure investments
The key to solving the African starvation is supporting developing countries building the necessary industrial infrastructure for high yield energy intensive food-processing industries. Elimination of farm subsidies programs in Japan, North America and Europe would create a potential 600 billion dollar market for African agriculture exports and a means to feed her people.
During the past 30 years, forecasting storm track have improved dramatically, but the understanding of the interdependency of the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean dust storms, locust invasion cross the Sudan green belt and the Sahara desert to the formation of powerful class of hurricanes has being suppressed and blackout of mainstream weather forecasting.
The UN report warms that mass hunger and famine is entombing millions of people in already at risk African states. The very fragile farming infrastructure in East Africa is the only thing standing in the way of the famines in spread in southern Sudan. This process of deepening African famine is adding dangerous new power to storms coming to the Americas.
Given the African roots of this new type and power of hurricanes and the lack of international funding to deal with the dust and other types of thermal hotspots, the Financial Times and the US speaker of the House of Representative have gone public with suggestions that the city of New Orleans not be rebuilt.
The larger question of western food subsidies and the recovery of Africa farming should frame the question of New Orleans reconstruction and how the United States address the new stronger Africa fed hurricanes.
By Isiah Scott
Sahara Desert fertilizes storms
The Sahara Desert historically fertilizes the Amazon; this process has been going for thousands of years. The nutrient rich dust travels from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean both in the air and water to the Americas. But something is happening; there is a dieback of the forest in the Amazon.
The Sahara desert is expanding in a southern direction creating million of hectares of new farming wastelands. The very fragile balance of dry lands and wetlands in the Sahara is shifting toward a new wide spread dust bowel. The collapse of Sudanese belt farming is adding billion of tons of dust to the atmosphere and the hurricane corridor over the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas.
Massive locust invasions are under way in the Sudan belt from West Africa and migrating to East African across Central Africa now infesting the country of Chad. This pan-Sudan invasion has infested and destroyed millions of hectares of farmland cross Africa. This invasion of locusts backed after years of oil led civil conflicts had exacerbated the impact of drought spurring a food crisis and a Mid-Atlantic dust storm.
Collapse of Sudanese farming
The UN report warmed in the spring of 2005 that mass hunger and famine is bearing down on millions of people in Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso and southern Sudan. The very fragile health and farming infrastructure in Chad is collapsing. The famine is now spreading into southern Sudan along the path of the US World Bank ordered death march. These crises are linking together to form a Pan African-Sudanese belt human nightmare. The famine is also creating massive amount of dust from the Sahara spreading south deeper into the Sudan green belt.
The Saharan dust is also blowing across the Atlantic Ocean and into Gulf of Mexico.
This Saharan dust also has formed a group of new deadly thermal hotspots alone the historical hurricane development path across the Atlantic Ocean that Northern American hurricanes take to the American homeland.
These thermal hotspots add massive energy via heat to the tropical depressions that reform into hurricanes like Katrina.
Atlantic Ocean hot spots move into Gulf
It appears the these Saharan hot spots are also interfacing with the Mississippi River plume both in the Gulf and the Western Atlantic Ocean near the eastern United States over the Gulf Stream. This Atlantic dust is critical to wind intensity, some suggest that this dust layer is mixing with sea spray feed the development of storms in the layer between the ocean and the air and makes it possible for extremely high winds to form.
These African hotspots have moved in the Gulf of Mexico and have interfaced with other chemically created hotspots alone the Northern Mississippi River. The African hotspots are also interacting with the chemical toxic Mississippi River plume flowing into the Gulf creating addition thermal islands to feed storm crossing the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Billion tons of Sahara dust contributes to the intensity of North American hurricanes. In the case of power of hurricane Katrina, the transfer of Mid-Atlantic dust hotspot clearly contributed to its force. There are deepening interdependency Atlantic Ocean dust storms, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico and storm recharging in the Gulf itself.
Given this new type and power of hurricanes and their growing threats to many eastern and southern American cities, the Financial Times and the US speaker of the House of Representative have gone public with suggestions that the city of New Orleans not be rebuilt. With no international funding to address the collapse of African farming, the billion of tons of dust coming to North American will not only continue, but also increase.
According to Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, more than 100 of every thousand Ghanaian children die before their fifth birthday. This is at least 10 times the rate of the rich countries. These deaths are preventable, but the health budget is only one quarter of what is needed to tackle the crisis. The Ghanaian austerity budget supervised by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank constitute a death warrant that results from Ghana’s poverty and the lack of sufficient donor aid.
Cameroon and Chad, the potential breadbasket of Central Africa, helplessly watch as their oil and foreign multinational oil companies pipe gas they need to develop their agriculture export trade out of their countries below market prices. Some of the foreign multinationals oil companies are leading recipients of farm subsidies.
Unknowing taxpayers from North America, Japan and Western Europe paid 600 billion dollars a year or 8,000 dollars per family via farm subsidies and military defense to ensure the death warrants are served on the world’s starving people.
Under pressure from a 600 billion dollar federal debit and then Secretary of State C. Powell, reportedly forced President George Bush has pledged in 2002 a strong reduction in US subsidies, but only on the condition that Japan and Europe Union do the same. Bush lacked the political will to stand up to the multinationals killing Africa’s agriculture trade. So the African starvation and ethic cleaning has gone on for two more years and the subsidies remain in place.
US Corporate Welfare, African starvation
The Bush pledge should have been the basis for a new Africa policy initiative, but died when the Bush administration signed into law the $171 billion-farm subsidies bill in 2002, that shattered all records of corporate welfare. The Bush African trade pledge was naked political deception and misinformation. The US subsidies triggered a new round of subsidy increases and deepened levels of wide world starvation. The Western media all but blacked out the linkage between the Bush subsidy policy and deepening collapse of African agriculture export trade. African share of world exports declined from an already low 4 percent in 1980 to 1 percent in 2003. The 1 percent has been maintained by the increase in the world price of oil and masked the actual degree of non-energy collapse of African agricultural trade.
The European Union and Japan and even Mexico followed suit by increasing their subsidies programs or what BusinessWeek calls ‘armor plating’ farm economies. Bush lacked the political will to defend his own plan to reduce subsidies, against the Chinese containment faction in his administration.
Chinese containment policy, African starvation
The economic aspects of Powell’s new African initiative became an early victim of the new Chinese containment policy. US farm subsidies, Chinese oil imports and the Space arms race became critical economic weapons in a Cold War strategy to try and bankrupt Chinese military expansion. China has become a net importer of food. The US containment strategy is forcing China to make cash payments for imported food and oil. China is paying almost 90 billion dollar a year for oil. Reports of food shortages are reported across China. US multinationals are emerging as a major exporter of strategic foods to China, i.e. by maintaining artificially low foods prices worldwide; the US is retarding Chinese agriculture development. China is importing 7 billion dollars of food and grains from US multinationals.
The myth of Gleneagles G8 African aid initiative
The 25 billion dollars the Gleneagles G8 current spend on development assistance for extreme poverty is less than 5 percent of the money that ensure that genocide and ethic cleaning takes place. The G8 African aid increase does not even offset the recent armor plating subsidies increases by the US, EU and Japan. The proposed new funding level of 50 billion dollar a year in official aid for Africa translates into around 75 to 100 dollars per African. The United States five-year commitment is less than one day of Pentagon spending, and two cents of every 1,000 of US national income. Canada and Japan while agreeing to given 0.7 of their GND to aid extreme poverty have refused to commit to a timetable. More importantly, none of the G8 countries will publicly debate mush less commit to any timetable to phase out farm subsidies.
100 million Africans at risk of extreme poverty
Mr. Blair and other British officials continue to struggle with the Group of Eight (G8) countries to commit to an extra 50 billion dollars in political face saving aid to Africa by 2010. After all the recent Africa aid press and rallies, 10 billion dollar a year to save starving Africans would seem to be a small amount money for the richest countries in the world to come up with for the food security crisis for 700 million poor Africans. Even with the international community watching, forcing the powerful farm subsidies lobby to give up even 10 billion dollar its corporate welfare is proving to be politically impossible. Reportedly the G8 new plan will only save 10 million of the 100 million African at risk of starvation. The major foods producing African states are pushing for Europe to open its markets to new African exports.
The source of the African food crisis is one of the oldest and most powerful white lobbies, the New York –London slave cabal. These super rich banking families and multinationals are fighting to maintain financial hegemony over African political economy even face massive worldwide political protest. The human nightmare that was the Belgium Congo is the concept ional model to understand the current African crisis.
Unlike their advanced western oil and manufacturing interests, there is no comparative economic advantage in most market agribusiness segments without major infrastructure investments. Without the farm subsidies, multinationals can complete in world agriculture trade. Since the establishment of new World slavery, these rich families have used taxpayer’s money to subsidize their agribusinesses. The Irish famine was to support food pries in British and forced ethic clearing of Ireland. Farm subsidies are naked political corporate welfare.
According to the Heritage Foundation Policy Research & Analysis--John D. Rockefeller reportedly received 2001- 2002, 134,556 dollars in farm subsidies. The four large corporate recipients were Westvaco, Chevron, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance and Caterpillar. Less than 10 percent of the recipients receive 73 percent of all farm subsidies.
African food exporters are fighting to create the infrastructure conditions to develop the African agriculture trade to drive its industrialization.
In order to open up world agriculture trade to African producers, farm subsides must be immediately reduced by 50 present or 200 billion dollar and phased out in three years. Such a reduction would allow major new social programming in the United States. Even General C. Powell understood, this political challenge was a serious task that President Bush was not up to. World opinion is not enough to reduce the farm subsidy handouts. The solution of the African food security question threatens the bases of the post WWII Western power structure.
The political reality is that the whole effort by the G8 to save Africa is little more than an international public relations ruse. To its credit, Germany is actively resisting being part of the British ruse on African starvation. According to the Financial Times, the US is punishing Germany, officially for its Iraq opposition. While Africa is not mentioned, German opposition to the British ruse is a factor.
African food security is not about more aid, but about real investment in modern food-production infrastructure and exports opportunities.
Two years ago, July 2003, the presidents of Mali and Burkina Faso publicly begged President Bush in an op-ed article in the New York Times to change US farm subsidy policy:
West African Presidents speak out
The West African President stated-- Cotton is our ticket into the market. Its production is crucial to economic development in West and Central Africa, as well as the livelihoods of millions of people there. Cotton accounts for up to 40 percent of export revenues and 10 percent of gross domestic product in our two countries.
According to the International Cotton Advisory Committee, cotton subsidies amount to about 5.8 billion dollar in the production year of 2001 to 2002, nearly equal the amount of cotton trade for this same period. Such subsidies lead to worldwide overproduction and distort cotton prices, depriving poor African countries of their only comparative advantage in international trade.
Not only is cotton crucial to our economies, it is the sole agricultural product for our countries to trade. Although African cotton is on the highest quality, our production costs are about 50 percent lower than in developed countries even though we rely on manual labor. In wealthier countries, by contrast, lower-quality cotton is produced on large mechanized farms, generating little employment and having a questionable impact on the environment. The cotton there (US) could be replaced by other high valuable crops.
In the period from 2001 to 2002, America’s 25,000 cotton farmers received more in subsidies—some 3 billion dollars more—than the entire economic output of Burkina Faso, where two million people depend on cotton. Further, United States subsidies are concentrated on just 10 percent of its cotton farmers. Thus, the payment to about 2,500 relatively well off farmers has the unintended but nevertheless real effect of impoverishing some 10 million rural poor people in West and Central Africa.
The G8 leadership refuses to force multinationals oil companies taking Africa’s oil and gas, to provide the necessary energy to African food producers for massive food production in Africa to feed it starving people and earn export income. Development of a modern agriculture exports economy would be a critical first down the road toward African industrialization. The energy to produce the food is being taken away by the multinational oil companies. Energy rich Cameroon is now a net importer of industrial energy. Only 5 percent of the population consumes electricity, less than 7 million Btu (vs. US value over 400 million Btu). Wood burning is the basis for the agriculture economy.
600 billion dollars of Farm subsidies
The G8, also refuses to drop the 600 billion dollars of farm subsidies given to domestic multinationals who keep world food prices artificially low in G8 final markets, there by blocking tens of billion of dollars of African food imports to G8 markets. Ten of billions of dollars of developing countries energy is forcibly soled to oil multinationals at below mark prices to pay foreign debt. This 600 billion-corporate welfare political give away program funds the largest genocide and ethic cleaning campaign in human history. African and Latin American are unknowingly supporting it every time they buy food at multinational chain food stores.
Genocide against Africa
The United Nation Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) committed the International community to halving world poverty by 2015, a decade from now. The UN warns that 3 million children will die in Central and Western Africa alone. Millions of other Africans will die from starvation related causes. With the current oil crisis and subsides structure, the UNMDG goal is likely to be achievable only through the death of half of the poor by starvation, disease and local conflicts. In the case of Africa this could mean the deaths of another 100 million people over the next ten years. This G8 de facto food policy is tantamount to genocide against Africa.
The Doha Development Agenda negotiations, sponsored by the World Trade Organization, to reduce subsidies has collapsed. Rich countries would rather give African leadership 50 billion (an increase of only 10 billion dollars) and keep the 600 billion dollar farms subside program, rather than address the real African food security issue. The oil issue is well known, but the billions of dollar Japanese, American and European food subsidy issue is not. Multinational food-processing firms, lobby billions of subsidies behind nationalism, and protectionism, while third world peoples starve to death. Most food producing developing countries are unable to get either the international funding, food-processing, picketing or industrial markets to develop their agriculture markets.
Control oil, control food production
A real commitment to ending African poverty is a real commitment to a robust food-processing energy grid. Any thing short of an improved power grid will not work. Lack of oil to produce food in developing countries and subsidized agro-food multinationals in the industrial countries ensure the death of millions of Africans. Multinational energy companies are moving to take control of Africa’s energy grids to control food production. The reliable supply of energy is one of many important requirements for significant growth in Africa’s agricultural productivity. For farmers in most African countries, access to fuels or electricity for farm operations or crop processing is limited and very costly. If access can be improved, and energy needs for agriculture anticipated and met, then a potential roadblock to agricultural growth can be avoided.
Rapid growth in agricultural production could then stimulate rural and overall economic development. The objective of food security could come closer to reality, and exports of agriculturally based products could improve the regional trade balance. Simply put, the provision of energy for agriculture is essential to Africa’s long-term well-being. With oil now at 60 dollars per barrel and most African countries using oil exports to pay foreign debt, the rich countries beyond the reach of African farmers and food processing firms are keeping its use for food production. The direct consequence of energy triage is growing starvation, many cases, in African countries with massive amounts of oil and gas.
Elimination the multinational farm welfare program
Mali is unique among African countries for its significant nomadic and pastoral populations and for its extensive use of animal traction. In contrast, the potential “bread basket of the Central Africa” the Cameroon once rich in oil and gas, lies within the rich humid belt of Central Africa, with large potentially arable area, increasing cultivated requires modern agriculture infrastructure, ports, energy grids and careful tropical forest management. Cameroon and its river cities are ideally positioned for nuclear-powered value added food processing and manufacturing.
The Sudan is the potential “bread basket of the Middle East”
--with only 10 percent of its potentially arable land under cultivation and the greatest extent of irrigation in the region. This agricultural potential can be developed by an international political solution to the civil war and development of agriculture infrastructure and elimination to the multinationals in fighting over oil.
The key is not aid, but industrial infrastructure investments
The key to solving the African starvation is supporting developing countries building the necessary industrial infrastructure for high yield energy intensive food-processing industries. Elimination of farm subsidies programs in Japan, North America and Europe would create a potential 600 billion dollar market for African agriculture exports and a means to feed her people.
During the past 30 years, forecasting storm track have improved dramatically, but the understanding of the interdependency of the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean dust storms, locust invasion cross the Sudan green belt and the Sahara desert to the formation of powerful class of hurricanes has being suppressed and blackout of mainstream weather forecasting.
The UN report warms that mass hunger and famine is entombing millions of people in already at risk African states. The very fragile farming infrastructure in East Africa is the only thing standing in the way of the famines in spread in southern Sudan. This process of deepening African famine is adding dangerous new power to storms coming to the Americas.
Given the African roots of this new type and power of hurricanes and the lack of international funding to deal with the dust and other types of thermal hotspots, the Financial Times and the US speaker of the House of Representative have gone public with suggestions that the city of New Orleans not be rebuilt.
The larger question of western food subsidies and the recovery of Africa farming should frame the question of New Orleans reconstruction and how the United States address the new stronger Africa fed hurricanes.
posted by Nubianobserver at 2:10 PM
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