guardian.co.uk — Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.
Nov 22, 2008 View in Crawl 4
chemthreeNov 22, 2008
If done right by the poor countries (which is unlikely) this move could help millions of people around the world rise out of poverty.
ciaran036Nov 24, 2008
safeguard food for themselves might I add. The title of this Digg post does not do the article justice! Colonialism has been responsible for the deaths and enslavement of millions of Africans at the hands of the British alone at the end of the 19th Century. Those running the empire at the time literally saw the entire population of Africa as just another resource as they could use and abuse as they please. And that is what they did, and that is what they are continuing to do right up this very day. These days it's called neocolonialism, and those that grow the bananas and the coffee beans and the cocoa are only paid enough to barely live off. Naturally, this causes a trade deficit because in order to maintain any sort of adequate standard of living, the governments of these countries have to pay more for their imports from the more technologically advanced nations in the West (to pay for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, computing technology, communication networks etc.). They can't balance the money from the money they earn through their exports. That is why many of these countries are so laden with debt, and even with the 'Make Poverty History' campaigns which were fought hard just to exclude some countries from paying the interest from the massive loans they have got from the banks in the West. It is because of these corrupt bankers, heads of multi-national corporations and politicians that are working in concert to continue the death and suffering in the poorer nations of the world and the constant increase in living standards in the more economically developed nations, but as we have seen recently, for example with the multi-billion (or trillion...) dollar bailouts and the similar European version that has demonstrated that it is more a case of the money going into their pockets and not ours. Putting a few cents or dollars in a "Feed the Ethiopian" box you see in your local supermarket is not going to radically change things (although contributions can often make many generations of people in many communities have decent qualities of lives through sustainable aid schemes. Every penny/cent still does count!). The point I'm making is that we should also be forcing our "elected representatives" to actually bloody represent us and work for a decent standard of living for not just our own families all the other families in the world. That is entirely possible without any sort of change to the average standard of living in Western countries like the USA and UK.