While the mainstream media doesn’t always ignore the pressing issue of hunger in Africa, it rarely explores the root causes of this problem. Behind most news on the issue, there’s an assumption that casts hunger as a natural result of unfortunate weather conditions, coupled with bureaucratic inefficiency and bad economic planning.
This essay originally appeared in TomDispatch, a website run by Tom Engelhardt and associated with The Nation magazine.
In 1954, acclaimed novelist and thinker Richard Wright published Black Power about his visit to the Gold Coast (later Ghana) and his observations concerning the rise of the Pan-African movement. On the 100th anniversary of Wright’s birth, the American University of Paris is holding a centennial conference on June 19-21. In the lead-up to this conference, FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller discusses the novelist’s views on Africa and colonialism with James Miller (English and American Studies, George Washington University), Michele L. Simms Burton (African American Studies, Howard University), and Jerry W. Ward (English, Dillard University).
Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.
As global supplies shrink and the Middle East remains in turmoil, the United States is not without competition in Africa. China and other emerging economies are also looking to the continent and only seeing the oil needed to feed their rapid growth. This is especially true as new discoveries of oil on the African continent seem to pop up every year. Ghana discovered oil off its shores in 2007, Mauritania in 2006, and many other countries are ramping up exploration.
How-to-leave-Iraq plans have proliferated over the past five years. Most of the plans proposed by Democrats have brimmed with rhetoric aimed at scoring points against President George W. Bush rather than working out the messy details of how to end the occupation and what to do in its aftermath. Ten Democratic candidates for Congress have just changed that with the announcement of a plan that sets forth a strategic vision both to bring the Iraq War to an end and to prevent future “Iraqs.”
Having only recently become a U.S citizen, I now join the millions of immigrants eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election. For my native Latin America, none of the candidates is offering a real alternative to the failed policies that have made the U.S. government wildly unpopular among people from Mexico to Argentina.
While the economic contraction is apparently slowing in the advanced industrial countries and may reach bottom in the not-too-distant future, it’s only beginning to gain momentum in the developing world, which was spared the earliest effects of the global meltdown. Because the crisis was largely precipitated by a collapse of the housing market in the United States and the resulting disintegration of financial products derived from the “securitization” of questionable mortgages, most developing nations were unaffected by the early stages of the meltdown, for the simple reason that they possessed few such assets.
A common flaw in U.S. foreign policy is the politicization of foreign assistance. Whether Republican or Democratic, U.S. administrations allow narrowly defined “national interests” – instead of needs, priorities, and realities in a given country – to dictate foreign assistance. As a result, foreign aid often backfires, undermining long-term U.S. interests and fueling instability, conflict, and violations of core human rights standards. Nowhere is this truer than in Central Africa’s Great Lakes Region. Today, President George W. Bush supports corrupt, illegitimate regimes that will either cooperate in the Global War on Terror, provide U.S. companies access to vital natural resources, or both. If history is any indication, this infusion of wealth and military training is likely to be disastrous for the people of Africa.
In February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as the Africa Command or AFRICOM, to protect U.S. national security interests on the African continent. Previously, control over U.S. military operations in Africa was divided between three different commands: European Command, which oversaw North Africa and most of sub-Saharan Africa; Central Command, which had responsibility for Egypt and the Horn of Africa; and Pacific Command, which administered the Indian Ocean and Madagascar.