Farms to plantations: The West's corporate business plan for agriculture across Africa.
Displacing pastoralists, displacing smallholder farmers, arresting and charging them as terrorists if they protest - and the land is given away to foreign investors to grow what? Sugar and cotton. Imagine trucks full of food aid coming into Ethiopia, while trucks full of cotton and sugar are leaving the country. Hunger in Africa is not caused by the fact that Africans don't know how to grow food. Hunger in Africa is a political problem.
Oakland Institute executive director Anuradha Mittal explains how the Gates Foundation and Western governments are using development concerns to corporatize African agriculture - turning small scale farms for local populations into industrial plantations for global export, at the cost of food security, land rights and the environment - and why the future of farming and food in Africa must belong to the African people, not tech billionaires and global agrichemical corporations.
The Oakland Institute released the report The Unholy Alliance: Five Western Donors Shape a Pro-Corporate Agenda for African Agriculture.
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