LAND GRAB fueling POVERTY ─ cbc ca Dispatches

Notes, editing by Carolyn Bennett for Today’s Insight News

Reflecting on another illustration of how the pervasive corporation/imperial state collusion creates, recreates and exacerbates inequality, hunger and poverty. Lead-ins from this week’s CBC Dispatches

Lead-in to Canadian journalist Joan Baxter’s documentary “The great African land grab” ─ In Sierra Leone, on the bulge of northwest Africa, people measure prosperity in rice. They  have a saying: If you have not eaten rice today, you have not eaten.

Slave traders who went to Sierra Leone centuries ago called it ‘The Rice Coast.’ People from Sierra Leone, known as Gulas, developed rice plantations in the colonies: [North America's] Carolinas.

In their native land Sierra Leoneans grow rice mostly on small family farms. Before the civil war that decimated their country in the years 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leoneans produced enough rice to feed themselves and to export.

Now, foreign corporations are taking over vast tracts of farmland. Sugar cane is replacing rice and the yields converted to ethanol for foreign industries and cars.

Might these big land deals hurt Sierra Leone’s struggling ability again to feed itself? Not to worry ─ It’s all been arranged, apparently. Even if there are some big questions as to how…

Lead-in to Portfolios of The Poor co-author Jonathan Morduch’s story of a South African grandmother managing to save money despite next-to-no income. Many of Africa’s family farmers and nearly three billion other people around the world get by on about two-dollars a day.

It takes a lot of effort to survive on so little.…

“Dispatches” (January 14/17, 2010) is a weekly radio program of reports and documentaries by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondents and other journalists on assignment outside of Canada, http://www.cbc.ca/dispatches/

Also

GRAIN, Genetic Resources Action International, a small international non-profit organization working to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems GRAIN, http://www.grain.org/front/

Food crisis and the global land grab (Governments and corporations are buying up farmland in other countries to grow their own food – or simply to make money), a blog containing mainly news reports about the global rush to buy up or lease farmlands abroad as a strategy to secure basic food supplies or simply for profit. The blog’s purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring or researching the issue, particularly social activists, non-government organizations and journalists. Food crisis and the global land grab, http://farmlandgrab.org/

FLASHBACK 2004

U.S., Haiti in Global community

Former U.S. Congresswoman McKinney

“Nowhere do we see the impotence of Black America played out before our eyes and those of the world as we now see in the case of Haiti.  … It hasn’t always been this way and it doesn’t have to be this way.…

“What becomes of a community that rewards those who pick the fruit up but fails to protect those who shake it down? “Tree shakers are all over the globe trying to uplift their communities. Only through our active and informed participation in the political process here will we be able to stop the powers that produce pernicious policies.

“Only through our participation in the political process will we be able to protect [those in] the global community ─ like Haiti, like Venezuela ─ from the vicissitudes of powerful people acting in our name who do not care one whit about the values that we hold dear.

“Black America, vibrant with authentic leaders ─ in active partnership with all progressives ─ can change what is happening here at home and the policies being implemented abroad.”

“Haiti and the Impotence of Black America ─ Roll Back this Coup, Mr. Bush”

by Cynthia McKinney, former Member of the U.S. House of Representatives in a March 6 address at a UC Berkeley conference ‘The Role of Law & Policy: Africa, the Caribbean & the U.S.’ sponsored by the African-American Law and Policy Report posted March 19, 2004, at Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/mckinney03192004.html
Also "Cynthia McKinney reports from Haiti," April 22, 2009, Pan-African News Wire,
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2009/04/cynthia-mckinney-reports-from-haiti.html