It's Pretty Clear That Europe Is Using 'Trade' Deals to Steal Food from Poor
Countries

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted August 28, 2008.

A new wave of food colonialism is taking food from the mouths of the poor.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the
famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began
when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau.
As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England
of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in
imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, "the most
colossal and expensive meal in world history between 12 and 29 million
people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As
Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression
that he would do anything to please his master. Today he is the European
trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in Brussels and Strasbourg,
he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit Europe to snatch food from the
mouths of some of the world's poorest people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes from
fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it sustains a
population which ranks close to the bottom of the human development index.
One in six of the working population is employed in the fishing industry;
some two-thirds of these workers are women. Over the past three decades,
their means of subsistence has started to collapse as other nations have
plundered Senegal's stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a
result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no
longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won't
confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats. The
EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa.
Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of Senegal, granting
our fleets access to its waters. As a result, Senegal's marine ecosystem has
started to go the same way as ours. Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of
fish taken from the country's waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons.
Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the
number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48 percent since 1997.

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing families
which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the
price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has
happened in all the west African countries with which the EU has maintained
fisheries agreements. In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange,
their primary source of protein has been looted.

The government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its
fishing agreement with the EU. But European fishermen -- mostly from Spain
and France -- have found ways round the ban. They have been registering
their boats as Senegalese, buying up quotas from local fishermen and
transferring catches at sea from local boats. These practices mean that they
can continue to take the country's fish, and have no obligation to land them
in Senegal. Their profits are kept on ice until the catch arrives in Europe.

Mandelson's office is trying to negotiate economic partnership agreements
with African countries. They were supposed to have been concluded by the end
of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign.
The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to
establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national
treatment. This means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate
between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be
forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and
to feed its own people. The dodges used by European trawlers would be
legalised.

The UN's Economic Commission for Africa has described the EU's negotiations
as "not sufficiently inclusive." They suffer from a "lack of transparency"
and from the African countries' lack of capacity to handle the legal
complexities. ActionAid shows that Mandelson's office has ignored these
problems, raised the pressure on reluctant countries and "moved ahead in the
negotiations at a pace much faster than the [African nations] could handle."
If these agreements are forced on West Africa, Lord Mandelson will be
responsible for another imperial famine.

This is one instance of the food colonialism which is again coming to govern
the relations between rich counties and poor. As global food supplies
tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry. Last
week the environmental group WWF published a report on the UK's indirect
consumption of water, purchased in the form of food. We buy much of our rice
and cotton, for example, from the Indus Valley, which contains most of
Pakistan's best farmland. To meet the demand for exports, the valley's
aquifers are being pumped out faster than they can be recharged. At the same
time, rain and snow in the Himalayan headwaters have decreased, probably as
a result of climate change. In some places, salt and other crop poisons are
being drawn through the diminishing water table, knocking out farmland for
good. The crops we buy are, for the most part, freely traded, but the
unaccounted costs all accrue to Pakistan.

Now we learn that Middle Eastern countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are
securing their future food supplies by trying to buy land in poorer nations.
The Financial Times reports that Saudi Arabia wants to set up a series of
farms abroad, each of which could exceed 100,000 hectares. Their produce
would not be traded: it would be shipped directly to the owners. The FT,
which usually agitates for the sale of everything, frets over "the nightmare
scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals
look on." Through "secretive bilateral agreements," the paper reports, "the
investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the
host country might impose during a crisis."

Both Ethiopia and Sudan have offered the oil states hundreds of thousands of
hectares. This is easy for the corrupt governments of these countries: in
Ethiopia the state claims to own most of the land; in Sudan an envelope
passed across the right desk magically transforms other people's property
into foreign exchange. But 5.6 million Sudanese and 10 million Ethiopians
are currently in need of food aid. The deals their governments propose can
only exacerbate such famines.

None of this is to suggest that the poor nations should not sell food to the
rich. To escape from famine, countries must enhance their purchasing power.
This often means selling farm products, and increasing their value by
processing them locally. But there is nothing fair about the deals I have
described. Where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now
use chequebooks and lawyers to seize food from the hungry. The scramble for
resources has begun, but -- in the short term at any rate -- we will hardly
notice. The rich world's governments will protect themselves from the
political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve

George Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read
more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared in the
Guardian.