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Since when did the people at the top have even the slightest inkling about what the poor people down below, the ones that we have trampled on, might be in need of to help them get out of the poverty that is entrenching their lives? Since when did the people at the top ever have the knowledge that the poor trampled masses actually existed? Isn’t it always the way? The rich little kid that believes that nobody lives in high-rise blocks and that everyone has a lawn that gets cut by the gardener. Others just couldn’t live any other way, could they? That’s what the G8 used to be like, anyhow. Today, the leaders are more than aware that the poor exist, since they have a right to be heard today. There are too many of them not to be heard and we have started listening to Africa only because there are growing numbers of poor in our own backyard, these days. But, theNew Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition that was launched by the G8 is nothing more than a hell-bent drive for money-making and profit of private companies, rather than actually doing much to help the ones that are in need of food.
It’s covert colonialism by the G8 countries. That’s rich, harking back to the past when we are having trouble dealing with the present and at the same time closing our own frontiers to immigration. Still, the poor die of hunger anyhow and people won’t be able to hear them complaining. In the meantime, the West, the G8 gets a much-needed boost to their economies and the state coffers. At the same time, the populations of the G8 countries get to sleep peacefully at night thanking their lucky stars that they have a government that is altruistic and benevolent, even charitable. More like malevolent. The people always need dazzling, so they can’t see what’s really going on behind the scenes.
The New Alliance means that agribusiness will be sitting alongside governments and that African governments will make changes in their laws, policies and regulations so that it will sweep in a new attractiveness for the private sector that wishes to invest there. The G8 has, in its patronizingly over-bearing tone declared that it was going to be the sole decision-maker on this and local farmers weren’t going to be consulted. Of course they weren’t consulted. They don’t get heard because they are the poor. They haven’t been able to get themselves out of poverty so why would the G8 give them a role to play other than the one that is given to them?
But, it gets worse, since now the governments of those countries have decided to change land and tax laws so that private businesses from the west are favored over the local farmers. Export controls have been eased and enormous pieces of land have been taken over to be given to private firms. Malawi has set aside 200, 000 hectares of land for such commercial use. Nigeria has promised to allow energy companies to be privatized. New Alliance was meant to be for food production for Africa to stop them farming, but much of the land will be used to produce cotton, biofuels and rubber. That way they will die a quicker death. 50 million people were meant to be on the road to having enough food to survive by the year 2022.
Taxes on seed were also part of the agreement, meaning that seed will have to be imported in the future by the local farmers. Smallholder farmers will simply disappear for the profit of the large Western companies that will be running the land in large-scale commercial farming.
It was under Barack Obama’s initiative that the scheme was launched at Camp David in 2012. Eradicating poverty had already been promised at the G8 meeting in L’Aquila in Italy in 2009 and there are countless examples of how we were going to solve the problem of the starving millions. We never have. Although, this means that we will put another nail in their coffin and at the same time look retrospectively back at the colonial past.
The G8 is hiding behind apparent admirable values of getting African countries out of the rut of poverty and into the new world of consumerism. But, covertly, it’s just a scam to get rich countries richer in the process and favor private enterprises from our economies rather than the African ones. In essence, in the end, the G8’s poor attempt called New Alliance will do nothing more than make the rich richer, and the poor will just meaninglessly lag behind the rest of us in the world’s economies. Governments today and even citizens still believe that we need to have the poor so that we can be the rich, anything else would be tantamount to sharing equally, and we don’t share todays with the little poor kids that live down the next block.
Originally posted: G8’s Scam on Poverty Eradication [4]
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