great work G8!!!

Go team!

Dream on Oligarchs. Africa is fast rising. It’s just a question of cutting Europe loose and keeping extra-continental troops out. Just as OPEC nations need to build their own refineries, just so Africa must take on the challenge of manufacturing their own high priced industrial items. Avoid competing with each other and look for regional economies of scale. The commodities index is just begging to be milked. Go for it. Build it into your projections. Avoid leaning too heavily on me-too technology, don’t be afraid of bold innovation if it’s intelligent. And.

What’s happening in Congo? Turn up the volume on that one. And the Locusts.

I personally think Qaddafi is too susceptible to flattery and would avoid giving him any kind of pedestal. No matter what he seems to be selling. The Sahara Desert is as big as any Ocean. It’s up to you to decide, of course, individually, I’m probably being a worry wart. But. Recent events in Europe seem a bit coincidental. Sure looks damning to moi.

Seven years is a generous chunk of time. Do not underestimate the value of self-respect. Si se puede and no estas solo.

African leaders split on unity

Because we don’t want it to be met.

If it looks like a duck…

We get more out of their instability, better use and abuse of their land, resources and people.

More on this from Der Spiegel (the mirror):

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL:

Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

....

SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?

Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there’s a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn’t exist at that time.

Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It’s not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it’s only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why’s that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa’s biggest business. There’s nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

More

Nice post Liam

The concept of “development goals” is flawed from a different perspective as well. Say you have a farmer who works a few acres of land in Mozambique. He sells a little of his product for cash, eats some of it and gives a little to friends/relatives in exchange for goods and services.

The government of Mozambique is approached by a hotel developer/agribusiness corporation/diamond miner who wants the land that our farmer works. They point to the local community and say that the people earn very little money (less than a dollar a day!) and suggest that if their investments are approved the income of the community will vastly increase.

So the diamond mine is built and the farmer loses his land. He’s now a miner, or more likely he’s moved to the big city to work as a street vendor or for a wage. Now he’s earning $800 per year, but he’s much hungrier and he’s working harder, in a more polluted environment, with more social tension and violence.

Why’s he hungrier? Because he isn’t producing his own food and he’s buying it from middlemen. Moreover, he can’t access what are called by development wonks “non timber forest products” ie wild food, medicines etc… nothing is for free.

So he can be twice as rich in monetary terms but much poorer in real terms.

Then why postulate a slight increase in dollar income as a “millenium development goal” and not the settlement of people on fertile land, with tools, education, and healthy ecosystems to support them?

Cui bono.

Another point. The ideology of development is heavily laden with the class interests of dominant institutions within already developed nations (ie the replication of the conditions which secured their dominance in other parts of the world). So it’s not a great surprise that the major driving force behind the MDGs is to put more money in the hands of the undeveloped, to get them to depend upon internationally circulating cash and to become accustomed to wage labour and/or international market oriented production.

That is, rather than producing for local markets, using forms of exchange other than currencies linked to the U.S. dollar and working predominantly for themselves, or community institutions, rather than capitalist institutions – which rely upon the wage labour system.

One ideological consequence seems to be the devaluing of goods which are procured without cost, or are freely available to all without the mediation of capital – a great example being foraged forest greens and folk medicines. But it also entails the erosion of local belief systems – forms of community cohesion (ie folk tales, musical forms, ritual). These “free” forms of social support are never valued by central government, which administers the rituals of either a) neolioberalism (minimal welfare) or b) social democracy (welfare state) both of which intensify the dependence of individuals on wage labour and state functions.

So in one sense the ideology of development demands the obliteration of “place” – which I take as an intense knowledge of, identification with and dependence upon/with the local environment. The universalisation of currency implies the commodification of local goods, the valuation of forests, rivers, mountains as ecologies which provide economic “services” rather than living beings which interact dynamically with the people who serve them and shape them.

So if a forest is highly valued by international standards then it is liable to be shuttered off, segregated and “protected” not just from the depredations of money-seekers, but also of local agricultural/belief systems. And that’s because having the forest preserved in a “pristine” state is more valuable on a number of levels than allowing people to percolate through it, slash and burn it, gather its products, revere it etc… What we often call “traditional” systems which use forests in this way are really non-monetized or lightly monetized social forms. They generate little for the money-world, for capital.

Pristine forests are immensely valuable. For eco-tourism, for big pharma, for illegal loggers/loggers who play the long game, for those who want to evict local people and exploit their labour and for propaganda use against the “savages” or in favor of the developmental state, which grants the forest to the nation as a present or patrimony.