Re-reported by Carolyn Bennett

ARMS to Africa will neither Benefit Africa nor Eliminate Poverty

The only real change and true benefit U.S. foreign policy can make to Africa is to assist and support the United Nations Millennium Goals to eliminate global poverty — especially in Africa because this continent has suffered so deeply for so long under European colonialism and, in contemporary times, under multinational corporate/governmental colonialism that continues a brutal looting far worse than casino-plundered Atlantic cities or Niagara-USA, leaving Africa’s land and peoples bereft, reversing even limited progress eked out in years between wars (cold and hot).

Africa “has been deprived of trade and investment over decades and, if that has not been bad enough, the effects of poor environmental management outside the continent are today compounding Africa’s crisis of poverty” said Togolese activist Ekplom Afeke while attending the April meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development(UNCTAD) in Accra, Ghana.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agrees that globalization’s benefits increasing trade and investment have “yet to be of any benefit to Africa.” Africa’s share of global trade and foreign investment is a mere three percent and the best way of boosting this figure “is by ensuring a rapid breakthrough in the Doha Round (of global trade negotiations) — one that incorporates significant development and infrastructure advances facilitated through aid for trade”

The Doha Development Round of trade talks under the auspices of the World Trade Organization is stymied by disagreements among global powers and between them and underdeveloped countries trying to resist ruin of their countries. During the first half of 2005 little progress was made over the major issues under negotiation—market access, export subsidies, and domestic price support.

In the past decade African governments have benefited from the boom in commodity prices, increasing their spending on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to promote broad-based development, the secretary-general said, but ‘‘the MDG challenge has been complicated by the alarming rise in global food-prices, a price rise that threatens to undo the gains achieved so far in fighting hunger and malnutrition.”

And narrow agreements, according to an Oxfam report, make matters worse not better for Africa. Citing the EU example without mentioning the U.S. militarist example, the UK-based group warned in an April report that economic partnership trade deals will do ‘‘irrevocable damage to the development prospects of some of the poorest countries in the world.” Unless current plans are overhauled, the narrow free trade deals will hurt poor people and undermine development across Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific. The cost will be enormous in “annual losses from tariff cuts of $360 million for Africa alone and a further $9 billion for compliance for all the countries involved’’

Never mind the harm to Africa and other regional and farther-reaching countries, the Obama/Clinton militarist team, according to Inter Press Service News Agency, is pushing arms on Africa (augmenting Clinton I/Bush II’s foreign policy) and planning to peddle more militarism across the continent.

$800,000 to pay for arms sales to South Africa (up from nothing in the current fiscal year)
$2.45 million for the Democratic Republic of Congo (up from $600,000)
$1.35 million for Nigeria (the same amount as in the current fiscal year)
$9 million for Liberia (up from $1.5 million)

Training in the United States for African military officers through the International Military Education and Training programme, the State Department plans to spend:

$900,000 for South Africa
$500,000 for Angola
$500,000 for the Democratic Republic of Congo
$1.1 million for Nigeria
$525,000 for Liberia
$125,000 for Cape Verde

In case you missed it on CNN — the Republic of Cape Verde or Portuguese República de Cabo Verde is a group of islands with few natural resources, no fresh water; but international air services from its island Sal to Lisbon, Boston, Moscow, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil. It lies 385 miles (620 kilometres) off the west coast of Africa. Its major health problems are diarrhea in infants, caused by poor hygiene; cases of malaria on São Tiago, leprosy on Fogo.

Cape Verde relies heavily on imported foodstuffs. During the decade-long drought of the 1970s, 95 percent of food needs were met by imports. Among its chief agricultural exports have been bananas and coffee but crops grown for local consumption are corn (maize), sugarcane, castor beans, broad beans, potatoes, and peanuts (groundnuts). Severe and recurrent droughts affect the islands, causing unemployment and a dramatic fall in crop output.

The overwhelming majority of the islands’ population is Creole (mulatto), the descendants of early contacts between Portuguese settlers and Africans brought as slaves to work on the plantations in the 16th century.

But instead of promoting self determination, development that sustains human beings and the environment, poverty elimination— the United States government and its change agents and “smart” policy makers are peddling destabilization, enhanced conflict, and arms to poor Africa.

The U.S. Department of State in Fiscal Year 2010 plans, according to IPS, to spend—

$20 million on the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership
$10 million on the East Africa Regional Strategic Initiative
$3.6 million on the Africa Conflict Stabilization and Border Security programme
$4.5 million for sub-Saharan Africa on the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement programme
$8 million for Kenya
$1 million for South Africa

‘Anti-Terrorism’ — $15.2 million for an Africa Regional
programme to be used anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa

‘Peacekeeping’ Operations — $21 million (for Democratic Republic of Congo), $10 million (Liberia), $67 million (equipping and training troops participating in the African Union’s Somalia ‘peacekeeping’ mission and Somalia’s security forces), $42 million (equipping and training the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in southern Sudan).

The U.S. government has it dead wrong, again. But in the Americas are other policy voices who have taken what seems to be a different, more progressive instead of regressive master/slave approach. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, says Ekplom Afeke, “has stepped up technical cooperation between his country and a number of African countries to increase agricultural production— These are the visionaries of the future without whom Africa would never leave the starting blocks.”

Will someone please tell the Obama administration that its foreign policies, as those of its predecessors, are unconscionable (outrageously so!!) and not without lasting negative impact on domestic affairs of the United States of America?

Sources

Britannica

ENT: Views Clash at UNCTAD Over What’s Best for Africa”(Francis Kokutse), April 23, 2009. http://ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=42090

“Clinton Pledges Military Aid to Somalia and Other African Countries” (Daniel Volman)
Inter Press Service News Agency, Monday, August 10, 2009, http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=48013

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Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett -author, independent journalist Blog: Today's Insight News Blog: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/
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