Capitalist market starves Africa
By G. Dunkel
Millions of African people are facing starvation. While
drought is the reason suggested by most of the press, falling
commodity prices are often more important.
The two main areas where hunger has become a major problem
are in the northeast--Ethiopia and Eritrea--where 12 million
people are currently at risk, and southern Africa--Zimbabwe,
Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zambia--with 16
million at risk.
Incredibly, Ethiopia is now being sued for $500 million by a
group of wealthy European individuals and families for property
expropriated in the 1970s by the Derg, the revolutionary
military government that overthrew the emperor and nationalized
the land and private businesses.
Nestle, the multibillion-dollar food conglomerate, was part
of the suit until its public relations department, sensing
worldwide outrage, advised it to withdraw and promise that it
would donate any money recovered to famine relief.
The current Ethiopian government is trying to settle these
claims in order to attract investment.
Ethiopia's income from coffee, its major export, has
collapsed as world prices have plummeted to 30-year lows. Last
year it earned $149 million from its coffee exports, down from
$257 million the previous year. Facing drought and famine, it
can't afford to buy food and medicine on the world market. And
even if it gets enough food stocks donated to feed its people,
it still has to distribute them.
This means supplying and maintaining the trucks that shuttle
the food from the port of Djibouti, and that takes hard
cash--foreign exchange--to pay for the fuel and spare parts
required.
The world capitalist media are showing dead cows and
starving children with sunken cheeks and distended bellies.
Politicians visit Ethiopia from Europe and the U.S. and give
press conferences on how conditions are now worse than in 1984,
when 50,000 people died.
What they don't mention are the lawyers in a British court
demanding that the poorest country in the world, where most
people live on less than $2 a week, come up with four times
more money than the value of its major export.
And the big-business media won't explain how IMF/World Bank
dictates to poor countries that they increase their production
of export commodities like coffee eventually leads to a glut on
the world capitalist market, causing their income to actually
fall.
Reprinted from the Jan. 23, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
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