The Colonialism of Food Security
China does its very best for its very own. It's a huge problem to solve a haunting dilemma. How does a vast country which, despite its immense geography representing 8% of the world's tillable farmland, produce enough food to feed a population representing over 20% of the world's population?Well certainly not by observing careful agricultural practises, and restoring to the spent soil what has been taken out of it. By letting some land lie temporarily fallow, or by reversing crops, or by re-investing the soil with the nutrients that have been removed. Its own arable landspaces have suffered, and so has their atmospheric environment.
There are some scientists, population specialists, environmentalists who claim we are polluting our environment beyond redemption, as well as producing far too many people in a finite landscape.
And that as the earth's population becomes more numerous and as the search for water to fulfill basic needs, as well as to secure sufficient land to grow food crops, we may have to begin looking elsewhere for those need to be fulfilled. Sending out pioneers to brave new horizons. Pioneers in space, looking to settle themselves on other planets. Fairly far-fetched.
Yet China has begun to embark on something similar. She has signed partnership contracts with some Latin American and African countries to lease arable land for agricultural purposes.
To send forward some of her many farmers on a noble mission abroad to grow scarce and needed crops in African settings, to be sent back to China, to help feed her growing masses. Imperial colonialism renewed; not in the interests of expanding geographic interest, nor of extracting natural resources, but of securing scarce farmland.
This is termed, in China, as the "go-out policy". In their anxiety for food sufficiency, Chinese companies buy and lease land, sending Chinese labourers out to do the work, and producing crops to be sent back home; even exporting some to the larger world market.
There are such agreements for leasing in Kenya and Uganda, in Mozambique and Tanzania. where local workers claim to have been exploited, having to work in inferior conditions, causing anti-Chinese protests.
Ironically, while this is happening, African countries are facing scarcity of their own food supplies. In the Rift Valley in Kenya, political violence caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes as youth mobs destroyed tons of corn and shut down tea farms.
The Rift Valley was considered the country's breadbasket; food prices have risen 30% there. Energy and fertilizer costs are soaring. Food prices have risen by 50% in West Africa. Violent demonstrations have broken out in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Ivory Coast.
Understandably, African countries are becoming alarmed by China's activities, encouraging their "go out" program to benefit China's population, with complicit African governing bodies at the expense of their own populations' food needs.
Labels: Environment, Political Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 11, 2008
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