The Hunger For Africa's Farmland

1849: The Irish Famine of the 1840s saw the death of a million people, yet during the five year period when the potato blight was at its worst, British-owned farms in Ireland continued to export food to Great Britain.

2009: Ethiopian famine is back in the news; 10 million of the 80 million inhabitants are suffering from the effects of a four-year drought, with over 6 million people urgently needing food.

Appeals have been made by the Ethiopian state minister for agriculture and rural development for over 150,000 tonnes of food to avert another tragedy.

The World Food Programme has pledged food supplies for Ethiopia's hungry poor, but their relief efforts will cross paths with large exports of food harvested from Ethiopian farms now owned by Saudi Arabian investors, suggesting that human history, like nature, works in cycles:

Early this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first few years and may export the entire crop back home.

Is this to be the new "Scramble For Africa", the start of another century of colonialism?

The strategy is portrayed by the Saudi leadership as benign. Saudi Arabia manages the agricultural production and human resources. It is not, therefore, exploiting cheap local labour. Neither is it profiteering in the global food market from higher agricultural yield, since produce is flown back for Saudi consumption. Yet a closer look at the countries being approached by Saudi investors shows a preference for weak or unstable states with low taxation, minimal bureaucracy and insufficient capital to grow food on the land (and thus a willingness to sell land to those that can, for less than it is probably worth).

Earlier this year a report entitled “Land Grab or development opportunity?", was released by United Nations-affiliated agricultural organizations FAO and IIED, addressing the growing race to acquire Third World farmland and the effect of this trend on rural populations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Their conclusion: Africa is almost giving away this land for free:

The report studied cases in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Madagascar and Sudan, uncovered farmland investment in the past five years totalling about 2.5m hectares – equal to about half the arable land of the UK.
Other estimates, including one from Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, put total farmland investments in Africa, Latin America and Asia above 15m hectares, about half the size of Italy.
Also raised in the report was the risk that poor people will lose access to farmland and water.
“Land allocations on the scale documented in this study do have the potential to result in loss of land for large numbers of people,” the report states.

Other analysts are more optimistic about the changes being sown:

[Joachim von Braun, director of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute] stressed that the foreign partnerships should benefit everyone by increasing worldwide food production. "We should not look at this trend with alarm. The more capital that finds its way into agriculture, the [bigger] the total pie."

But who gets the pie, and who gets the crumbs?

"When You Marry A Man With 86 Wives..."

Can there really be women alive today who can look to their direct life experience in order to be able to complete that statement?


Yes, sadly, in Nigeria, where the unemployed father of 170 children, Mohammed Bello Abubakar, has accumulated quite the family under his "control". From the BBC:

Nigerian Mohammed Bello Abubakar, 84, has advised other men not to follow his example and marry 86 women.
The former teacher and Muslim preacher, who lives in Niger State with his wives and at least 170 children, says he is able to cope only with the help of God.
"A man with 10 wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them," he told the BBC.
He says his wives have sought him out because of his reputation as a healer.
"I don't go looking for them, they come to me. I will consider the fact that God has asked me to do it and I will just marry them."

But such claims have alienated the Islamic authorities in Nigeria, who have branded his family a cult.
Most Muslim scholars agree that a man is allowed to have four wives, as long as he can treat them equally.
But Mr Bello Abubakar says there is no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives.
"To my understanding the Koran does not place a limit and it is up to what your own power, your own endowment and ability allows," he says.
"God did not say what the punishment should be for a man who has more than four wives, but he was specific about the punishment for fornication and adultery."
...
Ganiat Mohammed Bello has been married to the man everyone calls "Baba" for 20 years.
When she was in secondary school her mother took her for a consultation with Mr Bello Abubakar and he proposed afterwards.
"I said I couldn't marry an older man, but he said it was directly an order from God," she says.
She married another man but they divorced and she returned to Mr Bello Abubakar.
"I am now the happiest woman on earth. When you marry a man with 86 wives you know he knows how to look after them," she said.

Mr Bello Abubakar and his wives do not work and he has no visible means of supporting such a large family.
He refuses to say how he makes enough money to pay for the huge cost of feeding and clothing so many people.
Every mealtime they cook three 12kg bags of rice which all adds up to $915 (£457) every day.
"It's all from God," he says.

Other residents of Bida, the village where he lives in the northern Nigerian state, say they do not know how he supports the family.
According to one of his wives, Mr Bello Abubakar sometimes asks his children to go and beg for 200 naira ($1.69, £0.87), which if they all did so would bring in about $290 (£149).

Most of his wives live in a squalid, unfinished house in Bida; others live in his house in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.
He refuses to allow any of his family or other devotees to take medicine and says he does not believe that malaria exists.
"As you sit here if you have any illness I can see it and just remove it," he says.
...
She says that most of the wives see Mr Bello Abubakar as next in line from the Prophet Muhammad.
Indeed, he claims the Prophet Muhammad speaks to him personally and gives detailed descriptions of his experiences.
It is a serious claim for a Muslim to make.
"This is heresy, he is a heretic," says Ustaz Abubakar Siddique, an imam of Abuja's Central Mosque.

Some interesting links

How do we turn things around? How does a conservative hope to connect with a culture that in many respects is no longer conservative? These are the kinds of questions we frequently discuss on Thursday nights at the library. I just came across a couple of tentative but interesting answers. Britain's Peter Hitchens argues that it is wrong for conservatives to raise too many passions about the state of our fallen nations, passions we have no realistic ways to mediate. One must discover what are the pragmatic first steps for involving people again in their national covenant, that they may be free to find the compacts by which to live as they see fit, freed of the overbearing hand of the present soft-totalitarian state of the UK/EU. The first step is thus to reassert national sovereignty and democratic self-rule: Take Britain out of the EU!

But renewal is not just a political question. It also has a religious or cultural dimension. Peter Leithart (ht. Chris Morrissey) argues:

Here, as on so many other questions, there’s much to be learned from Christians in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience.

This special relationship is not unique to twenty-first-century Africa. Many African theologians invoke the patristic notion of a praeparatio evangelii, the belief that pre-Christian religion was designed to prepare the way for the gospel, to justify their approach to African religions. Athens might have been the birthplace of philosophy, but the Athenian citizens opened civic assemblies with sacrifices and Athenian women celebrated the Thesmophoria in honor of Demeter.
[...]
If Christianity is most successful among traditional religions, perhaps the Church has to reinvent primal religion before the West can be restored to Christ. Of course I don’t mean that churches should send their tithes to Wicca International or initiate pulpit exchanges with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Re-paganizing the West means acting on the premise that, for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it. Re-paganizing the West means working out the implications of the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion: We have never been modern.

Part of the trick is cultivating a healthy skepticism toward secularization theories. For Max Weber and armies of Weberian sociologists, modernity disenchanted the world, locking us all in the iron cage of rationalized bureaucracy. Even modern religion and music, Weber argued, submit to the tyranny of systematization and disperse the gods. Latour will have none of this. The world has not and cannot be disenchanted: “How could we be capable of disenchanting the world,” he asks, “when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? . . . How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things?”

Part of the trick, too, is recognizing the continuities between pagan and modern habits and learning to call them by their traditional names. If a rock concert looks, smells, and sounds like a bacchanal, why not call it that, with all the religious overtones that go with the name? If the rock star elicits frenzy, why not call him a shaman?
[...]
Kant moralized and modernized sin, atonement, justification, and the Church to bring Christianity to Enlightened maturity. Perhaps we must reverse the process and primitivize the Enlightenment, so that the gospel can again speak directly to our not-so-modern society. Perhaps we must re-paganize the West as a prerequisite to its re-evangelizing it.

Primitivize the Enlightenment? Some of our champions of modernity might have trouble with that rhetoric from the Idaho pastor, but he's surely right that modernity as we have experienced it, and not just idealized it, has contained a lot of primitive sacrificial thinking. At a time when Osama bin Laden is recommending we read Noam Chomsky, there may well be more people becoming more aware of the underpinnings of the left-Islamic alliance, epitomized by men like Chomsky who on the one hand comes across as an arch-Enlightenment rationalist, but on the other is clearly allied to some violent and irrational sacrificial forces. How has this historical merger come about? When we can well explain this to ordinary educated people, and show how so much of modern "Enlightenment" is a form of not-so-enlightened Gnosticism, we will be on the way to renewing their interest in the truer traditions of Western culture and becoming useful champions of both modernity and tradition.

Putting the brake on slavery

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement today on the bicentenary of the abolition of the african slave trade:

Today we mark an historic victory in the struggle for freedom and human dignity: the abolition of the African slave trade throughout the British Empire."
On March 25, 1807, King George III proclaimed into law the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the culmination of a decades long campaign by courageous abolitionists, led by the great parliamentarian William Wilberforce. With this the full might of the British Empire was directed to ending the barbaric practice of the African slave trade, that saw millions uprooted from their homes and families, transported in deplorable and often deadly conditions, then sold into a life of bondage in the Americas.
On this day we should also recall the important role that Canadians played in the struggle against slavery, most notably the leadership of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe who persuaded the Legislature of Upper Canada to adopt the first meaningful restrictions on slavery within the British Empire in 1793; and those who made Canada the North Star of the Underground Railroad for thousands of escaped slaves.
While we must always be vigilant in combating the vestiges of racial discrimination,
Canadians can take great pride that we have built a society of hope and equality of opportunity. Let us dedicate ourselves to continuing this work by combating contemporary forms of slavery, such as human trafficking.”

It's fitting that Prime Minister Harper ends his statement on this note, because it connects our duties today to the commitments of our predecessors. Western Civilization, enlightened and emboldened by Judeo-Christian principles of liberty, took the unprecedented step to listen to its conscience and abolish the vile practice of slavery. Canada can be proud of our particular contribution to that ennobling act: the forementioned Lt Governor Simcoe's Act Against Slavery was passed in 1793, long before slavery was officially abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833.

Progress requires truth, and truth requires honesty: it is an inescapable fact that the very Book of Instructions that was used as the authority to end slavery in the West, was for too long also enlisted to justify it. That shame was one of the motivating factors that pushed abolitionists to fight all the harder for redemption. Much of the West's progress has come from the incremental revelation of our fallibility, and our determination to progress beyond the shadow of our mistakes.
Our culture's abolition of slavery teaches the immortal lesson that just because something has always been so, is not the reason for it to remain so. Finding the proper balance between respecting tradition and valuing innovation has frustrated humanity's drive for progress, just as learning to drive a car involves a mysterious combination of alternating between the brake and the gas pedal. We're not always right when we guess when to go forward and when to stay in place; where we redeem ourselves, where we raise ourselves above animals and show our civility as human beings, is in the recognition that somehow there is a "forward" to get to. We are not frozen in time and place, as animals seem to be; lions are not soon to become vegetarian, after all, nor are cows prone to turn into man-eaters. As we navigate through this dance called human experience, it demands of us a combination of tradition and innovation, not just one or the other. We, as humans, are capable of change, and the more we value living up to our true potential, the more we should search for what this balance must be, from generation to generation, civilizing ourselves a step at a time along the journey.

Slavery must be one of the greatest of evils that has cursed our existence, and like all evil it comes from a lie: it carries within it the inherent denial of a fellow invidual's humanity. Slavery breaks the covenant that must exist between us, that despite differences in the physical shell we see on the outside, we should still strive to believe that there exists something within the shell, something without physical form or substance, that unites us together as participants in a shared experience. To practice slavery means to deny one person's existence as a human being, composed of a body and a soul, a life lived in the physical world and a life simultaneously experienced in, shall we say, a spiritial side. "Ownership" belongs in the world of the physical; how can one soul "own" another?

As civilized beings, dare I say as a very test of that civility, we must challenge ourselves to ask whether our revulsion towards slavery remains matched with ongoing committed action against it. For slavery is ongoing: slavery still exists, untold millions of our fellow human beings still suffer under its evil shadow... especially in Africa.

The William Wilbeforces and William Lloyd Garrisons of our modern age need more than courage and devotion, they also need honesty; honesty in admitting Where slavery exists, and Who lets this barbaric, uncivilized practice continue. It goes without saying that we need to grow more intolerant of the atheist pimps and the amoral scum who pleasure themselves in sex slave brothels... but we also need to summon the honesty to tackle all forms of slavery, everywhere, no matter how it might upset the multiculturalist left, determined as they are to freeze everyone into their current physical place... seeing human beings as they do, as mere animals, denying too many their access to the modernizing gas pedal that will drive them out of their medieval bondage, allowing their souls to taste the same life experiences that liberty brings to those of us in the modern West.

One example, from a December Reuters article:

...
Although banned by law in 1980, slavery in Mauritania has persisted, perpetuated by poverty and rigid customs. Authorities long denied its existence but campaigners estimate there are still hundreds of thousands of slaves among the 3 million population -- the highest ratio in the world. Chattel slavery, where one person is the property of another, has existed in the impoverished West African country for more than 800 years, since Arab-Berber raiders swept across the Sahara to subjugate black African tribes.

Traditionally, members of the haratin slave caste must marry who their masters say and can be given as gifts, bought and sold, or presented to the poor as charity.

Children are often separated from their mothers and sent to work in other homes. Girls frequently suffer sexual abuse.

"Westerners think of slaves as people in chains," said Boubacar Messaoud, head of SOS-Slave. "Slaves here have no need to be chained up because they are educated in submission ... They are chained in their heads."

Just as Christianity was once used to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade, rights workers say many Muslim teachers, or marabouts, in Mauritania preach subservience.

"Paradise under your master's foot" is a Mauritanian saying.