Africa: " I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. "

Health Poverty Action blogs


The true story of Africa’s billion dollar losses

Today Health Poverty Action, alongside a number of UK and African NGOs, has released research revealing that Africa is losing $192 billion every year to the rest of the world – almost six and a half times the amount of aid given to the continent.

Or in other words the date has changed but that is about all. Lord Ashcroft a finer example of greed and mans casual inhumanity to man I have yet to discover sees it like this.

" A billionaire lord has urged the British government to "turn off the golden taps" of foreign aid and stop pandering to "St Bob and Bono".

Lord Michael Ashcroft, who made his debut on the Forbes billionaire list this year with an estimated worth of $US1 billion, has written an open letter to newly-appointed International Development Secretary Justine Greening, cheekily signing off "Michael xx".

"At a time when libraries are being closed and people with disabilities face benefit cuts, there is growing fury over giving away ever-increasing sums to foreigners," Lord Ashcroft wrote in the letter, published on a conservative blog. "

It would seem that if the " Golden Taps " were turned off it wouldn't be us in the west doing the turning. 

This research is the first attempt to calculate Africa’s losses across a wide range of areas. These include: illicit financial flows; profits taken out of the continent by multinational companies; debt repayments; brain drain of skilled workers; illegal logging and fishing and the costs incurred as a result of climate change.

All fair enough but most are quite difficult to quantify, how do you calculate " brain drain " ? I suspect the figures are far higher than the estimates above. Think about it. Then think about how much of the money flowing in to Africa actually stays in Africa and how much simply clears Africa and moves on to western bank accounts. 

These figures highlight the huge disparity between aid and the resources leaving Africa. Health Poverty Action, along with our partner organisations, are calling on the UK government to reassess its focus on ‘aid’ which paints a misleading picture of the UK’s ‘generosity’ towards Africa, and take urgent action to address Britain’s contribution to Africa’s poverty.

Remember the United Kingdom is the inheritor of an empire, the greatest empire the world has ever known. Historically the wealth of a third of the world was at the disposal of that empire. So just how generous are the Brits. 

" The government ring fenced and raised DFID's budget by 34.2 per cent, to £11.5bn over the next four years. That outruns Britain's current record spend of 0.56 per cent GDP on overseas aid and will see it rise to 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2013."

0.7 per cent and the rest of the wealthy west are running on similar numbers. In other words we stole everything we could steal and our aid commitments wouldn't even begin to pay the interest had we borrowed what we stole let alone repaying some of the capital. But here is the rub... Lord Ashcroft and his ilk 

" In the letter published yesterday, Lord Ashcroft wrote he had spent much of his life travelling in Africa, Asia and South America and saw the "grinding" poverty.

Did he really see it ? I suggest not. Does he care well Wikipedia gives us some insight

"On 1 March 2010, after 10 years of holding his tax status as private, he revealed that he did not pay tax on his overseas earnings in the UK."

So we have a man who avoids paying tax and now wants to dictate where the people who actually do pay tax are able to spend it. He may sit in the House of Lords but he has never faced an election, he represents greed. "

Martin Drewry, Director of Health Poverty Action said:

“These figures expose the gross misconceptions about aid and ‘charity.’ The common understanding is the UK ‘helps’ Africa through aid, but in reality this serves as a smokescreen for the billions taken out. Let’s use more accurate language. It’s sustained looting – the opposite of generous giving – and we should recognise that the City of London is at the heart of the global financial system that facilitates this. As the general election approaches all party leaders must step up, and outline how they intend to take real responsibility and stop this plundering of Africa. And NGOs need to change too. We need to move beyond our focus on aid levels and communicate the bigger truth – exposing the real relationship between rich and poor and holding leaders to account.” 

" It’s sustained looting "  or in the words of Midnight Oil..

" The time has come, to say fair's fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share. "

Hat Tip Rosebell Kagumire

Australia: "...to pay the rent, to give it back, it belongs to them. "

The Guardian reports


Another stolen generation: how Australia still wrecks Aboriginal families
The mass removal of Indigenous children from their parents continues unabated – where is the outrage?

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because [as an Aboriginal Australian] you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again". A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."

This is beyond astonishing. It would seem Australia has learnt nothing from its past, I have no problem with kids being removed from inherently dangerous situations. Not removing them in New Zealand has lead to far to many of our kids dying.  The key point is that every attempt is made to place children the state has had to seize with other family members in a safe environment. 

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous stolen generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

That it happened is terrible, that it is still happening is beyond belief. In a study released today by Monash University Melbourne a finding was made that should scare the crap out of Australians.

" The migrants were asked whether they would describe Australians as caring, friendly and hospitable people; just 1 per cent of Kiwis did so, compared with 7 per cent of immigrants from the United States and Canada."

The Kiwi figure is not that much of a surprise, we know the Australians better than anyone else what is a real worry is that it would seem that Australia is falling behind both Canada and the USA. But of course America and Canada have like New Zealand at least made an effort to compensate indigenous citizens for the appalling damage inflicted on them through colonisation. Australia has done nothing, in fact it is doing worse than nothing. Nothing would be a blessing.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the colour", the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state". The report called this genocide.

It is genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as "reconciliation" and "Stronger Futures" cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the stolen generation, he added: "I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation." The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a "shrewd manoeuvre" that "cleared away a piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet changes nothing".

" There will be no compensation...."  We may not have it exactly right in New Zealand but at least we have made an effort.

" Treaty of Waitangi claims and settlements have been a significant feature of New Zealand race relations and politics since 1975. Over the last 30 years, New Zealand governments have increasingly provided formal legal and political opportunity for Māori to seek redress for breaches by the Crown of the guarantees set out in the Treaty of Waitangi. While it has resulted in putting to rest a number of significant longstanding grievances, the process has been subject to criticisms from a number of angles, from those who believe that the redress is insufficient to compensate for Māori losses, to those who see no value in revisiting painful and contentious historical issues. The settlements are typically seen as part of a broaderMāori Renaissance."

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been "removed". This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

I guess it easier to keep people in poverty and despair than to take ownership of the past in a real way with an apology Rudd that is genuine and a plan to right the wrongs, easier still to keep on inflicting a very Australian genocide that you hope the world will not notice.  

Pat (not her real name) is the mother whose anguish was secretly recorded on a phone as four department of child services officials, and six police, descended on her home. On the tape an official claims they have come only for an "assessment". But two of the police officers, who knew Pat, told her they saw no risk to her child and warned her to "get out of here quick". Pat fled, cradling her infant, but the one-year-old was eventually seized without her knowing why. The next morning a police officer returned to apologise to her and said her baby should never have been taken away. Pat has no idea where her son is.

So the police knew she was a good mother two officers told her to bugger off quick. What is wrong with this picture, Australian police have guns, I am not a fan of giving cops guns, not least because they never seem to know when to use them. Those cops should have drawn their weapons and defended " Pat " a few dead Child Service Officials who are clearly not fit for the job would have been a small price for the Australian community to pay.  

Once she was "invited" by officials to bring her children to "neutral" offices to discuss a "care plan". The doors were locked and officials seized the children, with one of the youngest dragging on a police officer's gun belt. Many Indigenous mothers are unaware of their legal rights. A secretive children's court has become notorious for rubber-stamping removals.

You steal a country, you then commit acts of genocide on the indigenous population 200 years later. Fuck you Australia.

Most Aboriginal families live on the edge. Their life expectancy in towns a short flight from Sydney is as low as 37. Dickensian diseases are rife; Australia is the only developed country not to have eradicated trachoma, which blinds Aboriginal children.

Australia is of course known as the " Lucky Country " I guess you have to be White.

Pat has both complied with and struggled bravely against a punitive bureaucracy that can remove children on hearsay. She has twice been acquitted of false charges, including "kidnapping" her own children. A psychologist has described her as a capable and good mother.

Josie Crawshaw, the former director of a respected families' support organisation in Darwin, told me: "In remote areas, officials will go in with a plane in the early hours and fly the child thousands of kilometres from their community. There'll be no explanation, no support, and the child may be gone forever."

Think about that. It would result in a substantial gaol term in most nations.

In 2012 the co-ordinator general of remote services for the Northern Territory, Olga Havnen, was sacked when she revealed that almost A$80m (£44m) was spent on the surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only A$500,000 (£275,000) on supporting the same impoverished families. She told me: "The primary reasons for removing children are welfare issues directly related to poverty and inequality. The impact is just horrendous because if they are not reunited within six months, it's likely they won't see each other again. If South Africa was doing this, there'd be an international outcry."

Exactly. But it is our mates the Aussies....fuck you Australia I am ashamed of you, the ANZAC code only goes so far and you have broken it.

She and others with long experience I have interviewed have echoed the Bringing them Home report, which described an official "attitude" in Australia that regarded all Aboriginal people as "morally deficient". A department of family and community services spokesman said that most removed Indigenous children in New South Wales were placed with Indigenous carers. According to Indigenous support networks, this is a smokescreen; it does not mean families, and it is control by divisiveness that is the bureaucracy's real achievement.

I met a group of Aboriginal grandmothers, all survivors of the first stolen generation, all now with stolen grandchildren. "We live in a state of fear, again," they said. David Shoebridge, a state Greens MP, told me: "The truth is, there is a market among whites for these kids, especially babies."

It is time to sanction Australian politicians and senior officials. 

The New South Wales parliament is soon to debate legislation that introduces forced adoption and "guardianship". Children under two years old will be liable – without the mother's consent – if "removed" for more than six months. For many Aboriginal mothers like Pat, it can take six months merely to make contact with their children. "It's setting up Aboriginal families to fail," said Shoebridge.

Not at all Australia sets families up to succeed if they are white it is setting up Aboriginal families to fail. That is genocide.

I asked Josie Crawshaw why. "The wilful ignorance in Australia about its first people has now become the kind of intolerance that gets to the point where you can smash an entire group of humanity and there is no fuss."

Why indeed.

Africa: Best intentions not withstanding

The Guardian reports

Decoding 'orphan crop' genomes could save millions of lives in Africa

Howard-Yana Shapiro, a scientist with the Mars confectionery company, will make the information free to boost harvests

" The future wellbeing of millions of Africans may rest in the

 unlikely hands of a vegan hippy scientist working for a sweet

 company who plans to map and then give away the genetic 

data of 100 traditional crops."

Vegan hippy scientist's would normally be the absolute last people I would expect to come up with a great idea. 

Howard-Yana Shapiro, the agriculture director of the $36bn US confectionery corporation Mars, led a partnership that sequenced and then published in 2010 the complete genome of the cacao tree from which chocolate is derived. He plans to work with American and Chinese scientists to sequence and make publicly available the genetic makeup of a host of crops such as yam, finger millet, tef, groundnut, cassava and sweet potato.

I am sort of surprised to say the least. I have never met a Vegan as far as I know that even has passing acquaintance with sanity. Hippies I am slightly more relaxed about.  

Dubbed "orphan crops" because they have been ignored by scientists, seed companies and governments, they are staples for up to 250 million smallholder African farmers who depend on them for food security, nutrition and income. However, they are considered of little economic interest to large seed and chemical companies such as Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta, which concentrate on global crops such as maize, rice and soya.

Well I suspect that they were of little interest,  Monsanto, Bayer etc will no doubt be rethinking their positions. The chance to enslave economically a further 250 million people would be of huge interest to them.  

According to Shapiro, there is huge potential to develop more resilient and higher-yielding varieties of most orphan crops by combining traditional plant breeding methods with new biotech tools such as "genetic marking". This does not involve the altering or insertion of genes that takes place with controversial genetic modification.

Which of course leads to the question what is " genetic marking " and on this occasion Google was not my friend but...

" genetic marker - a specific gene that produces a recognizable trait and can be used in family or population studies "

So at a guess this aging hippy has figured out a way to pick winners in the seed population of crops. Sound great but it also would seem to be exactly what most if not all prudent small holders do already. If you have a high yielding plant then you select the seeds of that plant for future cultivation. 

"The genetic information will be put on the web and offered free to plant breeders, seed companies and farmers on condition it is not patented. A new African plant-breeding academy will also be set up in Nairobi, Kenya," he said.

OK I am starting to sound like a wet blanket but I am really failing to see any practical outcome for the average African farmer. I have far easier access to the web so I can probably get the information but what on earth would I do with it ?  The truth is for most of us this is  science fiction.

How is the information above going to help me grow better sweet potatoes ? 

"It's not charity. It's a gift. Its an improvement of African agriculture. These crops will never be worked on by the big five [seed] companies. They don't see them as competition."

Actually I doubt that but, that aside if they don't work on it who will ?

Shapiro, a leading plant scientist who founded organic seed company Seeds of Change but sold it to Mars in 1997, now cuts an idiosyncratic figure in the corporate food world, sporting a long beard and listing motorcycles as a favourite pastime. But he said that the culture of the family-owned corporation had advantages. "It took less than a nanosecond to decide not to patent. Ownership was not an issue," he said.

I can't argue with the idea that someone owning genetic material ( other than their own genetic material ) is a revolting concept. 

Genetic use restriction technology (GURT), colloquially known as terminator technology or suicide seeds, is the name given to proposed methods for restricting the use of genetically modified plants by causing second generation seeds to be sterile. The technology was developed under a cooperative research and development agreement between the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land company in the 1990s, but it is not yet commercially available.

Because some stakeholders expressed concerns that this technology might lead to dependence for small farmers, Monsanto Company, an agricultural products company and the world's biggest seed supplier, pledged not to commercialize the technology in 1999. Customers who buy patented transgenic seeds from Monsanto must sign a contract not to save or sell the seeds from their harvest, which preempts the need for a "terminator gene". The Delta and Pine Land Company, which had performed greenhouse tests of Terminator seeds and owned a Canadian patent on Terminator granted on October 11 2005, intended to commercialize the technology, but D&PL was acquired by Monsanto in 2007.

Shapiro is angered by the stunting caused by malnutrition that affects 30% of African children. By improving the crops, he said, the African orphan crop consortium, which includes corporations such as Life Technologies and the conservation group WWF, could eradicate a "plague" that costs Africa $125bn a year. "We will start with genomics, go to analysis, then to plant breeders, then to the field, then the seed companies, and then to the farms," he said.

Again we have this huge supply chain that is largely dependent on good will and external funding, I am not arguing that it is the wrong way to do it ( indeed it is probably the only way to do it )  but again I doubt it will have any real tangible benefit. It is also difficult to see the Africa Orphan Crop Consortium as the vehicle to achieve this. It looks more like a PR exercise on the part of Mars Corporation. 

Officially launched at the Clinton Global Initiative meetings in 2011, the AOCC is an international effort to improve the nutrition, productivity and climatic adaptability of some of Africa’s most important food crops, helping to decrease the malnutrition and stunting rife among the continent’s rural children.

AOCC’s goal is to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 100 traditional African food crops, which would enable higher nutritional content for society over the decades to come. The resulting information will be put into the public domain, with the endorsement of the African Union.

Crops targeted for improvement

The focus crops are grown in all parts of Africa, but are referred to as “orphan crops” because, not being economically important on global markets, they have been largely ignored by researchers.

This includes, but is not limited to, crops like: Marula, Ethiopian mustard, Baobab, African eggplant, Egusi, Amaranth, Bananas (matoke), Moringa.

How will the AOCC improve these crops?

The AOCC will sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 100 neglected food crop species important to African farm family livelihoods and nutrition, a list chosen largely by African scientists. Early sequencing was carried out by the Beijing Genomic institute. The resulting data will not only be publically released, but will be worked on by researchers and breeders in Africa and elsewhere, and improved seeds will be provided to farmers all over Africa.

How will the AOCC get this information to farmers?

The AOCC created the African Plant Breeding Academy, which is establishing facilities at the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya and at a location in West Africa. The academy will train 250 plant breeding scientists and 500 technicians over five years.

Open-access publication of the cacao genome in 2010 is now bearing fruit. The genes that determine resistance to fungal infections and yield have been found and a new generation of cacao trees is being grown which should eventually quadruple production. "We haven't changed a single gene. It's inheritability. It's all done with grafting."

Would this have happened without Mars Corporations interest in a higher yielding  Cacao plant ?

But the "improved" seeds expected to come out of the $40m orphan programme could change Africa in unexpected ways. Nearly 80% of all seed used in Africa is selected, saved and exchanged by farmers without money changing hands. The result has been an immense diversity of crops suited to particular localities and cultures. The new, "improved" seeds of the orphan crops may increase yields or disease resistance but could be unaffordable and might oust traditional varieties. It is also possible that the genetic decoding could open the door to genetic modification.

Progress always has a price but who are we asking to take the risk and if necessary pay the price ? It is reasonable in a western context to expect those who expect to benefit to take the risk, but in an African context the price might well be starvation and death. What the hell is the point of doing this if at the end of the day the result even if fantastic is unaffordable ?

"Anything that keeps the [genetic] information out of proprietary hands is a good thing. But it's important to maintain the traditional varieties that have not been 'improved' and to keep a non-monetised path for the farming economy," said Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. "It's important to recognise improvements in crops are not just about genetics. How plants are managed is equally important."

Agreed.

Agricultural investment in Africa will be a key point at the G8 hunger summit in Northern Ireland next weekend. Governments and 45 of the largest agribusiness corporations are expected to unveil initiatives to boost African farming.

West and east African small farmers' groups have joined British charities to say that small-scale family farmers were being excluded from the talks even though they feed 80% of Africans. "It's very important that governments prioritise investment to support family farmers and their more ecological food production," said Patrick Mulvany, chair of the UK Food group.

"Technological advances in food production can be part of the solution to increase yields. But the world already grows enough food yet one in eight people go hungry every day. G8 leaders can begin to tackle the scandal of global hunger by closing the tax loopholes, improving land rights and increasing public investment in developing country agriculture," said Lucy Brinicombe, spokesperson for the If coalition of 200 groups which includes Oxfam and ActionAid.

There is an unavoidable truth we already can feed the world but we don't. There is enough but we don't care enough to do anything about that. Good on Howard-Yana, he is at least attempting to bring something new to the table but humanity has a long way to go yet.


Midnight Oil " Warakurna"

" Black man has a lot to fear "