In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of thefamines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when adrought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. Asstarvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of arecord 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperialsplendour and commissioned, among other extravagances, "the most colossal andexpensive meal in world history", between 12 and 29 million people died (1).Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As TonyBlair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression thathe would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European tradecommissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes toimpose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of someof the world’s poorest people.
Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes fromfish(2). Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains apopulation which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index. Onein six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry; sometwo-thirds of these workers are women(3). Over the past three decades, theirmeans of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have plunderedSenegal’s stocks.
The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result ofits failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meetEuropean demand. The other is that its governments won’t confront theirfishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The EU has tried tosolve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it hasstruck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting our fleets access toits waters. As a result, Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the sameway as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from thecountry’s waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by Europeantrawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run by localpeople has fallen by 48% since 1997(4).
In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families whichonce ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price offish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in allthe west African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheriesagreements(5,6). In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, theirprimary source of protein has been looted.
The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew itsfishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen - mostly from Spain andFrance - have found ways round the ban. They have been registering their boatsas Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and transferring catches atsea from local boats. These practices mean that they can continue to take thecountry’s fish, and have no obligation to land them in Senegal. Their profitsare kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.
Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements withAfrican countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end of lastyear, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. Theagreements insist that European companies have the right both to establishthemselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment. This meansthat the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businessesand European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish areused to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people. The dodges used byEuropean trawlers would be legalised.
The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU’s negotiationsas "not sufficiently inclusive". They suffer from a "lack oftransparency" and from the African countries’ lack of capacity to handle thelegal complexities(7). ActionAid shows that Mandelson’s office has ignoredthese problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and "moved ahead inthe negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] couldhandle." If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will beresponsible for another imperial famine.
This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern therelations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies tighten, richconsumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last week theenvironmental group WWF published a report on the UK’s indirect consumption ofwater, purchased in the form of food(8). We buy much of our rice and cotton, forexample, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of Pakistan’s bestfarmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley’s aquifers are beingpumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same time, rain and snow inthe Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as a result of climate change.In some places, salt and other crop poisons are being drawn through thediminishing water table, knocking out farmland for good. The crops we buy are,for the most part, freely traded, but the unaccounted costs all accrue toPakistan.
Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are securingtheir future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations. TheFinancial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of farmsabroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce would not betraded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT, which usuallyagitates for the sale of everything, frets over "the nightmare scenario ofcrops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on."Through "secretive bilateral agreements," the paper reports, "theinvestors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that thehost country might impose during a crisis." (9)
Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands ofhectares(10,11). This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: inEthiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope passedacross the right desk magically transforms other people’s property intoforeign exchange(12,13). But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians arecurrently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can onlyexacerbate such famines.
None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to therich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power. Thisoften means selling farm products, and increasing their value by processing themlocally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have described. Where oncethey used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use chequebooks and lawyersto seize food from the hungry. The scramble for resources has begun, but - inthe short term at any rate - we will hardly notice. The rich world’sgovernments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, evenif it means that other people must starve.
Advertisement
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Makingof the Third World. Verso, London.
2. ActionAid, 11th August 2008. SelFISHEurope.
3. ibid.
4. ibid.
5. Vlad M. Kaczynski and David L. Fluharty, March 2002. European policies inWest Africa: who benefits from fisheries agreements? Marine Policy, Volume 26,Issue 2, pp75-93. doi:10.1016/S0308-597X(01)00039-2
6. Tim Judah, 1st August 2001. Thebattle for West Africa’s fish.
7. UNECA, EPA Negotiations: African Countries Continental Review, African TradePolicy Centre, February 2007. Quoted by ActionAid, ibid.
8. Ashok Chapagain and Stuart Orr, August 2008. UKWater Footprint: the impact of the UK’s food and fibre consumption on globalwater resources. Volume one.
9. Javier Blas and Andrew England, 19th August 2008. Foreign fields: Rich stateslook beyond their borders for fertile soil. Financial Times.
10. ibid.
11. Barney Jopson and Andrew England, 11th August 2008. Sudan woos investors toput $1bn in farming. Financial Times.
12. For discussions of how landrights in Africa are overruled, see: LorenzoCotula, September 2007. Legal empowerment for local resource control.International Institute for Environment and Development and
13. Camilla Toulmin, 2006. Securing Land and Property Rights in Africa:Improving the Investment Climate. Chapter 2.3 of the Global CompetitivenessReport, World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
