Second enclosure plan for Africa

From Volatility:

Corporate Summit to Impose Hunger on Africa

The aptly named ”Hunger Summit” is the one year anniversary of the inaugural conference of the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, the corporatist strategy for the recolonization of Africa led by Big Ag and the G8. A year ago I called the opening session a Wannsee Conference for Africa. Obama was master of ceremonies at Camp David. This year Britain’s David Cameron has the honors. The criminal conference will deliver a progress report and issue a public strategy. African farmers, tribes, consumers, environmental and civil society groups are opposing this, with support from anti-corporatists and democracy activists from all over the world. Here’s the order of battle.

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The goal of the New Alliance is the corporate Gleichschaltung (coordination) of African agriculture and trade practices and policies for maximum plunder and domination. It’s the same slate of globalization and commodification practices which have already devastated much of humanity. African governments are to collaborate in dominating and exploiting the people and the land.

*A severe and rigorously enforced “intellectual property” regime, for the benefit of the GMO cartel and its patents, which were the result of piracy in the first place.

*The privatization of land. Indenture loans and distribution facilities for proprietary GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial machinery, commodified crops bound for ethanol and industrial food processing, can’t be arranged with people farming a commons. As a prerequisite, corporate gangs who would dominate and exploit these people and their land first need government to enclose and parcel out the land. This has been a priority of the World Bank going back to the 1980s. USAid chief Rajiv Shad has emphasized that the goal is to accelerate land grabbing. As Via Campesina put it, “These policies aim to allocate title deeds to land in order to facilitate the purchase and sale of landed property. In the end, poor peasants and other rural people lose out to the benefit of those who have the means to purchase land.” (p. 14)

*The formation of economic hierarchies to centralize and integrate production, processing, storage, and distribution. All this is to be done according to corporate specifications, toward the goal of forcing most farmers off the land, and reducing the rest to indentured servitude or wage slavery within a cash-based commodification regime. Today the farmers of Africa are smallholders and commons managers producing food for their families and communities. This is what must be eradicated and replaced by industrialized corporatization.

*Open borders for corporate dumping and looting (“free trade” is the standard Orwellian term for this; a truthful term would be something like corporate command trade), where it comes to the government-approved and licensed “formal sector”. Meanwhile traditional markets and actual free trading among the people would be criminalized and repressed.

*”Free trade” zones, tax-free zones, laws licensing the total repatriation of profits by Western “investors”. The ravage of Asia is set to be reproduced in Africa.

*Impose expensive industrial infrastructure on farmers. Offer credit in order to indenture them and trap them on the cash-crop treadmill. The procedure is always the same everywhere, with only minor modifications. 1. Propaganda – you have no choice but to get on board with commodification, and you better do it fast or you’ll be left behind. 2. Enforce this with dumping and general coercion into a cash economy. 3. Offer the necessary product (GMO seeds, synthetic fertilizer, industrial herbicide and pesticide, machinery, oil) and the loan in order to buy it. 4. In this way destroy most independent farmers completely, turn the rest into indentured sharecroppers or wage slaves.

... full article at Volatility.