The hedge fund managers, private equity kings, in other words, the folks that steal all our money, are on a mission; they are leasing huge tracts of land in Africa for crop production. Business Week* reports that Morgan Stanley, and other moneylenders are investing in African agricultural land. In the first six months of this year, private equity funds "lined up more than $2 billion to invest in farmland.." The magazine reports that thousands of investors attended Global AgInvesting 2009 in New York last June. "It's a mad scramble for African farmland right now" says one organizer. With a little western technology crops can be fertilized and profits made, investors are told in order to whet their appetites.
Former commodities trader, Phillippe Heilberg runs an investment company and has leased one million acres in Sudan. Helberg's last stint was with AIG, the worlds largest insurance company bailed out by the US taxpayer. He plans to grow rice, wheat and other crops "for export" says BW. There you go; exporting food in the middle of a famine area-------isn't freedom swell?
Not giving a damn about Africa after plundering it for centuries, the neo-colonialists are back. Rather than having to outright steal the land from its inhabitants, these guys lease it through government bureaucrats whose palms are greased by the multi-nationals.
One of the filthiest characters is Calvin Burgess. He is president of Dominion farms which is based in Oklahoma. He's just leased 17,000 acres in Kenya near Lake Victoria. He became interested in Kenya through a member of his church who frequented the country on "charitable trips." I once met one of these missionaries while waiting for a flight at O'Hare. She said she was going to Tanzania to teach. I knew she was going there to bamboozle the locals with her religious tales because she looked so happy. When she finally admitted she was doing some Christianizing there too I commented, "I think the Africans have had enough Christianity over the last 400 years, don't you?" That ended that conversation.
Calvin Burgess is also on a godly mission. He is investing in crop growing because he just loves to do good, put people to work and feed them. "God has plans for people's lives and I thought that maybe this was part of his plan for me." he says. Burgess has even erected a huge cross alongside his facility and has preached in a local church. But he was not well received, "Burgess came in to my church and claimed that we didn't know Christ well enough and we should do it right to prosper" said one local.
Burgess has built a reservoir and a dam and has been accused of polluting the water supply and making animals sick with their fertilizers, much like they do in the US. An independent soil and water study warned the locals not to drink water from the river as the presence of dieldrin was found. Dieldrin is a chemical ingredient found in some pesticides and was banned in the US in 1987. Burgess denies using it naturally. So perhaps it was just god's plan for the Africans and he didn't tell Burgess about it. No matter; either him, his god, or both of them are murderers.
The venture has displaced local subsistent farmers who are deathly worried that the intent is to drive them off land that they considered theirs and in to Nairobi to find work. The arrogant Burgess claims that the farms around "his comany's property" (His company's property??) are nothing more than "unproductive gardens." and that there was "no one there" before Dominion came. Isn't this what they said about America? Don't the Zionists say it about Israel/Palestine? Burgess claims he is there to help of course. But isn't this a familiar scene? How similar to the driving off of peasants from the land in England, Ireland, India, and tribal communities in North and South America; this is what capital does, and Burgess' Christianity has been along all the way.
Pesticide poisoning, homelessness, elimination of their means of subsitence, this is what Burgess and his hypocritical religious views bring the local people whose land he is stealing. How the words of Marx ring true, written so many years ago, he says of the capitalist class:
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere."
And:
"It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."
Who can argue with that!
Burgess' company, Dominion farms is part of a larger outfit, the Dominion Group that is involved in real estate development and manufacturing according to Business Week; it also ran private prisons in Colorado and throughout the US. It appears that Burgess' god has many different plans for him on his road to riches, for feeding Africans is not what is behind the surge in leasing agricultural land in Africa by commodity traders and speculators like Burgess and Morgan Stanley. Their investment in Africa is another sickening episode in Capitalism's destruction of our social and natural environment in its rapacious quest for profit. In what field of production (or speculation) they employ capital is incidental. That's what capitalism is. To quote Marx again:
“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”
Where's the Mau Mau when you need them?
* BW: 12-7-09 Land Rush in Africa
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