Africa: Open Regional Food Trade - World Bank
Speaking at an event in Washington, DC, Makhtar Diop, vice president of the World Bank, said African governments must work to remove barriers to regional food trade on the continent.
InFocus
-
A new World Bank report says that farmers can potentially grow enough food to feed the continent and avert future food crises if countries remove cross-border restrictions on the ... Read more »
Documents
-
Easing Barriers to Africa's Food Trade
- Publisher:
- World Bank
- Publication Date:
- 24 October 2012
A new report from the World Bank says Africa can feed itself, earn billions and avoid food crises by removing trade barriers within the continent. see more »
Comments Post a comment
This post was deleted because it contravenes AllAfrica's commenting guidelines.
The world bank is the biggest supporter of "land grabs" in Africa yet they keep putting out these press releases and articles talking about how Africans can "feed themselves" yet the only thing they have done over the last 5 years is tell African countries they need to give more land over to foreigners for export crops.
That is the reason why Africans cant feed themselves, because the foreigners are taking the best land and using it to export crops. Meanwhile Africans are left to feed themselves from food grown on tiny plots by "smallholder" farmers who have little to no wealth primarily because they don't own the land they are farming on. But of course the world bank crowd will try and convince you that these "smallholders" who don't have enough land to feed their own village, yet alone a country are going to be the "future" of African agriculture. If that is the case, then why on earth aren't other first world countries practicing this type of agriculture? Because it doesn't make any sense in the modern industrialized world. It is simply a recipe for failure that they push because it allows them to keep coming back year after year proposing solutions and meddling in Africa's internal affairs, purely for the benefit of foreigners and multinational agrobusinesses not the Africans. Smallholder farmers are the weakest link in the food chain and easily manipulated by foreign schemes which turn them into sharecropping slaves who depend on income received in return for growing crops and using seeds provided to them by these foreign operations. Such operations are also not about "feeding Africans" either. But they allow the foreigners to put out a bunch of happy sounding PR to make it look like they are trying to make a difference.
With all the big press releases and announcements of the world bank and FAO over the last 5-10 years about improving African agriculture why haven't we seen any results? Because these are simply PR scams not real solutions. Case in point, the African Green Revolution forum recently held. That whole forum is set up by and dominated by foreign agrobusinesses and their interests. Yet they put out PR to make it seem like it is about Africans having food to eat when it is not. These people shouldn't be allowed to put on these forums and symposiums which are blantantly using African people as "poster children" in a dishonest scheme for getting more profits for these foreigners as opposed to actually helping Africans.
Until you stop these wolves in sheeps clothing the agricultural situation will never ever change because these people don't want to change it to benefit Africans.
Another question to ask is if this is such a great solution propagated by the World Bank, then why haven't African government's tried this many years ago, even before the 5-10 year mark? It sounds like it would have been a no-brainer to import food from neighbors if these nations had to rather than import food from abroad. Could this be partially due to World Bank and IMF conditionalities that have nations 'liberalize' their markets before they are ready to, or in other words, let foreign imports flood domestic markets and drown out domestic production and perhaps imports from neighbors? They do these things and then come out and say that Africa can feed itself. Surely, the continent can, but the World Bank, at least indirectly, frustrated Africa's bid to do so. One must wonder what their agenda is now. As willd1mind referred to, it may very well be cover while they support forced land grabs, which we are hearing about all the time on this website.
See All Comments