Water, Rights and Privileges, and Global Markets

An article about famine in the Horn of Africa by Maude Barlow appeared today. It is worth your consideration. (h/t coberly) My own response is in comments. Following are excerpts:

Most Westerners see the crisis in the Horn of Africa as a combination of a large population, chronic poverty, corruption on the part of African government officials, failed states and no rain, and that none of this will ever change so giving money to this self perpetuating crisis is throwing it away. But I offered another narrative that I believe is closer to the truth.

I believe the water and food crises in the Horn of Africa are the direct result of old-fashioned colonial exploitation: land grabs by foreign hedge and investment funds and wealthy countries setting up large foreign-based agribusinesses that are guzzling the lion’s share of the water resources and using them to grow crops and biofuels for export and drive up speculation.

Foreign acquisitions are forcing small farmers and peasants off the land depriving them of access to food and water. The food and water of the region is being used for export for profit and not being used for local people. As a result, food prices in the region have gone up 200 per cent in less than a year and the price of water has risen 300 per cent. The foreign minister of Ethiopia defends his government’s actions with the neo-liberal explanation that these foreign “investments” will make the country wealthy enough that it can stop producing food and start buying it on the world market.

But exactly the opposite is happening when you drain the land of its water, as is being done by this agribusiness industry, and the rains stop coming. The drought is directly related to both climate change and the resulting desertification of a land stripped of its water sources. Here is what is essential to know: deserts can arise because humans treat land and water badly.

Desertification is taking place in over 100 countries in the world, as we strip the land of land-based water from aquifers and rivers, sending it to thirsty mega-cities (who dump it untreated into oceans), or using it to grow food and other goods for the world market, where it is transported out of local watersheds in the form of “virtual water exports.”

[end of excerpts. feel free to research the subject yourself. if Barlow is right, she provides a much more reality based understanding of what is going on in the world than the usual politicized and politicized economics analyses we usually see… coberly]